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S S AY S. 



By R. W. EMERSON. 



FIRST AND SECOND SERIES, 




BOSTON: 
TIOKNOR AND FIELDS. 

1866. 



1 






Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1865, by 

TiCKNOR AND FlELDS, 

in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of 
Massachusetts. 



v^C?^ ' 



'r 



University Press: 

Welch, Bigelow, and Company, 

Cambridge. 



CONTENTS. 

FIRST SERIES. 

ESSAY I. 
„ Page 

History i 

ESSAY II. 
Sblf-Reliancb II 

ESSAY III. 
Compensation 71 

ESSAY IV. 
Spiritual Laws loi 

ESSAY V. 
Love 151 

ESSAY VI. 
Friendship 149 

ESSAY VII. 
Prudence 171 

ESSAY VIII. 
Heroism 189 

ESSAY IX. 
The Over-Soul 207 



V 



iv CONTENTS. 

ESSAY X. 
Circles . . . .233 

ESSAY XI. 
Intellect 253 <, 

ESSAY XII. 
Art •••». 273 



SECOND SERIES. 

ESSAY I. 
The Poet , .291 

ESSAY II. 
Experience 325 

ESSAY III. 
Character .359 

ESSAY IV. 
Manners 383 

ESSAY V. 
Gifts 413 

ESSAY VI. 
Nature 421 

ESSAY VII. 
Politics. 445 

ESSAY VIII. 
Nominalist and Realist 465 



NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS 487 



FIRST SERIES. 






HISTORY. 



There is no great and no small 
To the Soul that maketh all : 
And where it cometh, all things are : 
And it cometh everywhere. 



I am owner of the sphere, 

Of the seven stars and the solar year, 

Of Caesar's hand, and Plato's brain. 

Of Lord Christ's heart, and Shakespeare's strain. 



ESSAY I. 



HISTORY. 




JIHERE is one mind common to all individ- 
ual men. Every man is an inlet to the 
same and to all of the same. He that is 
once admitted to the right of reason is 
made a freeman of the whole estate. What Plato has 
thought, he may think ; v^hat a saint has felt, he 
may feel ; what at any time has befallen any man, he 
can understand. Who hath access to this universal 
mind is a party to all that is or can be done, for this 
is the only and sovereign agent. 

Of the works of this mind history is the record. 
Its genius is illustrated by the entire series of days. 
Man is explicable by nothing less than all his his- 
tory. Without hurry, without rest, the human spirit 
goes forth from the beginning to embody every fac- 
ulty, every thought, every emotion, which belongs to 
it in appropriate events. But the thought is always 
prior to the fact ; all the facts of history pre-exist in 
the mind as laws. Each law in turn is made by cir- 
cumstances predominant, and the limits of nature give 
power to but one at a time. A man is the whole 
encyclopaedia of facts. The creation of a thousand 



4 USSAY I. 

forests is in one acorn, and Egypt, Greece, Rome, 
Gaul, Britain, America, lie folded already in the first 
man. Epoch after epoch, camp, kingdom, empire, 
republic, democracy, are merely the application of his 
manifold spirit to the manifold world. 

This human mind wrote history, and this must read 
it. The Sphinx must solve her own riddle. If the 
whole of history is in one man, it is all to be explained 
from individual experience. There is a relation be- 
tween the hours of our life and the centuries of time. 
As the air I breathe is drawn from the great reposito- 
ries of nature, as the light on my book is yielded by 
a star a hundred millions of miles distant, as the poise 
of my body depends on the equilibrium of centrifu- 
gal and centripetal forces, so the hours should be 
instructed by the ages, and the ages explained by the 
hours. Of the universal mind each individual man 
is one more incarnation. All its properties consist in 
him. Each new fact in his private experience flashes 
^ light on what great bodies of men have done, and 
the crises of his life refer to national crises. Every 
revolution was first a thought in one man's mind, and 
when the same thought occurs to another man, it is 
the key to that era. Every reform was once a private 
opinion, and when it shall be a private opinion again, 
it will solve the problem of the age. The fact nar- 
rated must correspond to something in me to be cred- 
ible or intelligible. We as we read must become 
Greeks, Eomans, Turks, priest and king, martyr and 
executioner, must fasten these images to some reality 
in our secret experience, or we shall learn nothing 
rightly. What befell Asdrubal or Caesar Borgia is as 



HISTORY. 5 

much an illustration of the mind's powers and depra- 
vations as what has befallen us. Each new law and 
political movement has meaning for you. Stand be- 
fore each of its tablets and say, " Under this mask did 
my Proteus nature hide itself" This remedies the 
defect of our too great nearness to ourselves. This 
throws our actions into perspective; and as crabs, 
goats, scorpions, the balance, and the waterpot lose 
their meanness when hung as signs in the zodiac, so 
I can see my own vices without heat in the distant 
persons of Solomon, Alcibiades, and Catiline. 

It is the universal nature which gives worth to par- 
ticular men and things. Human life as containing 
this is mysterious and inviolable, and we hedge it 
round with penalties and laws. All laws derive hence 
their ultimate reason ; all express more or less dis- 
tinctly some command of this supreme, illimitable 
essence. Property also holds of the soul, covers great 
spiritual facts, and instinctively we at first hold to it 
with swords and laws, and wide and complex combi- 
nations. The obscure consciousness of this fact is 
the light of all our day, the claim of claims ; the plea 
for education, for justice, for charity, the foundation 
of friendship and love, and of the heroism and gran- 
deur which belongs to acts of self-reliance. It is 
remarkable that involuntarily we always read as su- 
perior beings. Universal history, the poets, the ro- 
mancers, do not in their stateliest pictures, — in the 
sacerdotal, the imperial palaces, in the triumphs of 
will or of genius, — anywhere lose our eirs, anywhere 
make us feel that we intrude, that this is for better men ; 
but rather is it true, that in their grandest strokes we 



6 ESSAY L 

feel most at home. All that Shakespeare says of the 
king, yonder slip of a boy that reads in the corner 
feels to be true of himself. We sympathize in the 
great moments of history, in the great discoveries, the 
great resistances, the great prosperities of men ; — be- 
cause there law was enacted, the sea was searched, the 
land was found, or the blow was struck for us, as we 
ourselves in that place would have done or applauded. 

We have the same interest in condition and char- 
acter.- We honor the rich, because they have extern 
nally the freedom, power, and grace which we feel to 
be proper to man, proper to us. So all that is said 
of the wise man by Stoic, or oriental or modern essay- 
ist, describes to each reader his own idea, describes his 
unattained but attainable self. All literature writes 
the character of the wise man. Books, monuments, 
pictures, conversation, are portraits in which he finds 
the lineaments he is forming. The silent and the 
eloquent praise him and accost him, and he is stimu- 
lated wherever he moves as by personal allusions. A 
true aspirant, therefore, never needs look for allusions 
personal and laudatory in discourse. He hears the 
commendation, not of himself, but more sweet, of that 
character he seeks, in every word that is said concern- 
ing character, yea, further, in every fact and circum- 
stance, — in the running river and the rustling corn. 
Praise is looked, homage tendered, love floAvs from 
mute nature, from the mountains and the lights of the 
firmament. 

These hints, dropped as it were from sleep and 
night, let us use in broad day. The student is to 
read history actively and not passively ; to esteem his 



HISTORY, 7 

own life the text, and books the commentary. Thus 
compelled, the Muse of history will utter oracles as 
never to those who do not respect themselves. I have 
no expectation that any man will read history aright, 
who thinks that what was done in a remote age, by 
men whose names have resounded far, has any deeper 
sense than what he is doing to-day. 

The world exists for the education of each man. 
There is no age or state of society or mode of action 
in history to which there is not somewhat correspond- 
ing in his life. Everything tends in a wonderful man- 
ner to abbreviate itself and yield its own virtue to 
him. He should see that he can live all history in 
his own person. He must sit solidly at home, and 
not suffer himself to be bullied by kings or empires, 
but know that he is greater than all the geography 
and all the government of the world. He must trans- 
fer the point of view from which history is commonly 
read, from Kome and Athens and London to himself, 
and not deny his conviction that he is the court, and 
if England or Egypt have any thing to say to him, he 
will try the case ; if not, let them for ever be silent. 
He must attain and maintain that lofty sight where 
facts yield their secret sense, and poetry and annals 
are alike. The instinct of the mind, the purpose of 
nature, betrays itself in the use we make of the signal 
narrations of history. Time dissipates to shining 
ether the solid angularity of facts. No anchor, no 
cable, no fences, avail to keep a fact a fact. Babylon, 
Troy, Tyre, Palestine, and even early Kome, are pass- 
ing already into fiction. The Garden of Eden, the 
sun standing still in Gibeon, is poetry thenceforward 



8 ESSAY I. 

to all nations. "Who cares what the fact was, when 
we have made a constellation of it to hang in heaven 
an immortal sign ? London and Paris and New York 
must go the same way. " What is history," said 
Napoleon, " but a fable agreed upon ? " This life of 
ours is stuck round with Egypt, Greece, Gaul, Eng- 
land, War, Colonization, Church, Court, and Com- 
merce, as with so many flowers and wild ornaments 
grave and gay. I will not make more account of 
them. I believe in Eternity. I can find Greece, 
Asia, Italy, Spain, and the Islands, — the genius and 
creative principle of each and of all eras in my own 
mind. 

We are always coming up with the emphatic facts 
of history in our private experience, and verifying 
them here. All history becomes subjective ; in other 
words, there is properly no history ; only biography. 
Every mind must know the whole lesson for itself, — ■ 
must go over the whole ground. What it does not 
see, what it does not live, it will not know. What 
the former age has epitomized into a formula or rule 
for manipular convenience, it will lose all the good of 
verifying for itself, by means of the wall of that rule. 
Somewhere, sometime, it will demand and find com- 
pensation for that loss by doing the work itself Fer- 
guson discovered many things in astronomy which 
had long been known. The better for him. 

History must be this or it is nothing. Every law 
which the state enacts indicates a fact in human na- 
ture ; that is all. We must in ourselves see the ne- 
cessary reason of every fact, — see how it could and 
must be. So stand before every public and private 



HISTORY. 9 

work ; before an oration of Burke, before a victory of 
Napoleon, before a martyrdom of Sir Thomas More, 
of Sidney, of Marmaduke Robinson, before a French 
Reign of Terror, and a Salem hanging of witches, 
before a fanatic revival, and the animal magnetism 
in Paris, or in Providence. We assume that we 
under like influence should be alike affected, and 
should achieve the like ; and we aim to master intel- 
lectually the steps, and reach the same height or the 
same degradation, that our fellow, our proxy, has 
done. 

All inquiry into antiquity — all curiosity respect- 
ing the Pyramids, the excavated cities, Stonehenge, 
the Ohio Circles, Mexico, Memphis — is the desire to 
do away this wild, savage, and preposterous There 
or Then, and introduce in its place the Here and the 
Now. Belzoni digs and measures in the mummy-pits 
and pyramids of Thebes, until he can see the end of 
the difference between the monstrous work and him- 
self. When he has satisfied himself, in general and 
in detail, that it was made by such a person as he, 
so armed and so motived, and to ends to which he 
himself should also have worked, the problem is 
solved ; his thought lives along the whole line of tem- 
ples and sphinxes and catacombs, passes through 
them all with satisfaction, and they live again to the 
mind, or are now. 

A Gothic cathedral affirms that it was done by us, 
and not done by us. Surely it was by man, but we 
find it not in our man. But we apply ourselves to 
the history of its production. We put ourselves into 
the place and state of the builder. We remember the 



lo JESSAY I. 

forest-dwellers, the first temples, the adherence to the 
first type, and the decoration of it as the wealth of the 
nation increased; the value which is given to wood 
by carving led to the carving over the whole moun- 
tain of stone of a cathedral. When we have gone 
through this process, and added thereto the Catholic 
Church, its cross, its music, its processions, its saints' 
days and image-w^orship, we have, as it were, been the 
man that made the minster ; we have seen how it 
could and must be. We have the sufficient reason. 

The difierence between men is in their principle of 
association. Some men classify objects by color and 
size and other accidents of appearance ; others, by in- 
trinsic likeness, or by the relation of cause and effect. 
The progress of the intellect is to the clearer vision 
of causes, which neglects surface differences. To the 
poet, to the philosopher, to the saint, all things are 
friendly and sacred, all events profitable, all days 
holy, all men divine. For the eye is fastened on the 
life, and slights the circumstance. Every chemical 
substance, every plant, every animal in its growth, 
teaches the unity of cause, the variety of appearance. 

Upborne and surrounded as we are by this all-cre- 
ating nature, soft and fluid as a cloud or the air, why 
should we be such hard pedants, and magnify a few 
forms ? Why should we make account of time, or of 
magnitude, or of figure ? The soul knows them not ; 
and genius, obeying its law, knows how to play with 
them as a young child plays with graybeards and in 
churches. Genius studies the casual thought, and, 
far back in the womb of things, sees the rays parting 
from one orb, that diverge ere they fall by infinite 



HISTORY. II 

diameters. Genius watches the monad through all 
his masks as he performs the metempsychosis of na- 
ture. Genius detects through the fly, through the 
caterpillar, through the grub, through the egg, the 
constant individual ; through countless individuals, 
the fixed species ; through many species, the genus ; 
through all genera, the steadfast type ; through all 
the kingdoms of organized life, the eternal unity. 
Nature is a mutable cloud, v^hich is always and never 
the same. She casts the same thought into troops of 
forms, as a poet makes twenty fables with one moral. 
Through the bruteness and toughness of matter, a 
subtle spirit bends all things to its own will. The 
adamant streams into soft but precise form before its, 
and, whilst I look at it, its outline and texture are 
changed again. Nothing is so fleeting as form ; yet 
never does it quite deny itself. In man we still 
trace the remains or hints of all that we esteem 
badges of servitude in the lower races; yet in him 
they enhance his nobleness and grace : as lo, in 
JEschylus, transformed to a cow, offends the imagi- 
nation J' but how changed, when as Isis in Egypt she 
meets Osiris-Jove, a beautiful woman, with nothing 
of the metamorphosis left but the lunar horns as the 
splendid ornament of her brows ! 

The identity of history is equally intrinsic, the di- 
versity equally obvious. There is at the surface in- 
finite variety of things; at the centre there is simpli- 
city of cause. How many are the acts of one man in 
which we recognize the same character ! Observe the 
sources of our information in respect to the Greek 
genius. We have the civil history of that people, as 



12 £SSAY I. 

Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, and Plutarch have 
given it ; a very sufficient account of what manner of 
persons they were, and what they did. We have the 
same national mind expressed for us again in their 
literature, in epic and lyric poems, drama, and philos- 
ophy ; a very complete form. Then we have it once 
more in their architecture, a beauty as of temperance 
itself, limited to the straight line and the square, — a 
builded geometry. Then we have it once again in 
sculpture, the " tongue on the balance of expression," 
a multitude of forms in the utmost freedom of action, 
and never transgressing the ideal serenity ; like vota- 
ries performing some religious dance before the gods, 
and, though in convulsive pain or mortal combat, 
never daring to break the figure and decorum of their 
dance. Thus, of the genius of one remarkable people, 
we have a fourfold representation ; and to the senses 
what more unlike than an ode of Pindar, a marble 
centaur, the peristyle of the Parthenon, and the last 
actions of Phocion ? 

Every one must have observed faces and forms 
which, without any resembling feature, make a h'ke 
impression on the beholder. A particular picture or 
copy of verses, if it do not awaken the same train of 
images, will yet superinduce the same sentiment as 
some wild mountain walk, although the resemblance 
is nowise obvious to the senses, but is occult and out 
of the reach of the understanding. Nature is an end- 
less combination and repetition of a very few laws. 
She hums the old well-known air through innumera- 
ble variations. 

Nature is full of a sublime family likeness through^ 



HISTORY, 13 

out her. works ; and delights in startling us with re- 
semblances in the most unexpected quarters. I have 
seen the head of an old sachem of the forest, which 
at once reminded the eye of a bald mountain summit, 
and the furrows of the brow suggested the strata of 
the rock. There are men whose manners have the 
same essential splendor as the simple and awful 
sculpture on the friezes of the Parthenon, and the 
remains of the earliest Greek art. And there are 
compositions of the same strain to be found in the 
books of all ages. What is Guido's Rospigliosi Au- 
rora but a morning thought, as the horses in it are 
only a morning cloud. If any one will but take pains 
to observe the variety of actions to which he is 
equally inclined in certain moods of mind, and those 
to which he is averse, he will see how deep is the 
chain of affinity. 

A painter told me that nobody could draw a tree 
without in some sort becoming a tree, or draw a 
child by studying the outlines of its form merely ; 
but, by watching for a time his motions and plays, 
the painter enters into his nature, and can then draw 
him at will in every attitude. So Roos " entered into 
the inmost nature of a sheep." I knew a draughts- 
man employed in a public survey, who found that he 
could not sketch the rocks until their geological struc- 
ture was first explained to him. In a certain state of 
thought is the common origin of very diverse works. 
It is the spirit and not the fact that is identical. By 
a deeper apprehension, and not primarily by a painful 
acquisition of many manual skills, the artist attains 
the power of awakening other souls to a given ac- 
tivity. 



14 ESSAY I. 

It has been said, that "common souls pay with 
what they do ; nobler souls, with that which they are." 
And why '? Because a profound nature awakens in 
us by its actions and words, by its very looks and 
manners, the same power and beauty that a gallery of 
sculpture or of pictures addresses. 

Civil and natural history, the history of art and of 
literature, must be explained from individual history, 
or must remain words. There is nothing but is re- 
lated to us, nothing that does not interest us, — king- 
dom, college, tree, horse, or iron shoe, the roots of all 
things are in man. Santa Croce and the Dome of 
St. Peter's are lame copies after a divine model. 
Strasburg Cathedral is a material counterpart of the 
soul of Erwin of Steinbach. The true poem is the 
poet\s mind ; the true ship is the ship-builder. In the 
man, could we lay him open, we should see the reason 
for the last flourish and tendril of his work ; as every 
spine and tint in the sea-shell pre-exist in the secreting 
organs of the fish. The whole of heraldry and of 
chivalry is in courtesy. A man of fine manners shall 
pronounce your name with all the ornament that titles 
of nobility could ever add. 

The trivial experience of every day is always veri- 
fying some old prediction to us, and converting into 
things the words and signs which we had heard and 
seen without heed. A lady, with whom I was riding 
in the forest, said to me, that the woods always 
seemed to her to wait, as if the genii who inhabit 
them suspended their deeds until the wayfarer has 
passed onward ; a thought which poetry has celebrated 
in the dance of the fairies, which breaks off on the ap- 



HISTORY, 15 

proach of human feet. The man who has seen the 
rising moon break out of the clouds at midnight has 
been present like an archangel at the creation of light 
and of the world. I remember one summer day, in 
the fields, my companion pointed out to me a broad 
cloud, which might extend a quarter of a mile paral- 
lel to the horizon, quite accurately in the form of a 
cherub as painted over churches, — a round block in 
the centre, which it was easy to animate with eyes and 
mouth, supported on either side by wide-stretched 
symmetrical wings. What appears once in the at- 
mosphere may appear often, and it was undoubtedly 
the archetype of that familiar ornament. I have seen 
in the sky a chain of summer lightning which at once 
showed to me that the Greeks drew from nature when 
they painted the thunderbolt in the hand of Jove. I 
have seen a snow-drift along the sides of the stone 
wall which obviously gave the idea of the common 
architectural scroll to abut a tower. 

'Qj surrounding ourselves with the original circum- 
stances, we invent anew the orders and the ornaments 
of architecture, as we see how each people merely 
decorated its primitive abodes. The Doric temple pre- 
serves the semblance of the wooden cabin in which the 
Dorian dwelt. The Chinese pagoda is plainly a Tar- 
tar tent. The Indian and Egyptian temples still be- 
tray the mounds and subterranean houses of their fore- 
fathers. " The custom of making houses and tombs 
in the liviug rock,^' says Heeren, in his Researches on 
the Ethiopians, " determined very naturally the princi- 
pal character of the Nubian Egyptian architecture to 
the colossal form which it assumed. In these caverns, 



1 6 ESSAY I. 

already prepared by nature, the eye was accustomed to 
dwell on huge shapes and masses, so that, when art 
came to the assistance of nature, it could not move on 
a small scale without degrading itself. What would 
statues of the usual size, or neat porches and wings, 
have been, associated with those gigantic halls before 
which only Colossi could sit as watchmen, or lean on 
the pillars of the interior ? " 

The Gothic church plainly originated in a rude 
adaptation of the forest trees, with all their boughs, to 
a festal or solemn arcade, as the bands about the cleft 
pillars still indicate the green withes that tied them. 
No one can walk in a road cut through pine woods, 
without being struck with the architectural appearance 
of the grove, especially in winter, when the barrenness 
of all other trees, shows the low arch of the Saxons. 
In the woods, in a winter afternoon, one will see as 
readily the origin of the stained glass window, with 
which the Gothic cathedrals are adorned, in the colors 
of the western sky seen through the bare and crossing 
branches of the forest. Nor can any lover of nature 
enter the old piles of Oxford and the English cathe- 
drals, without feeling that the forest overpowered the 
mind of the builder, and that his chisel, his saw, and 
plane, still reproduced its ferns, its spikes of flowers, 
its locust, elm, oak, pine, fir, and spruce. 

The Gothic cathedral is a blossoming in stone sub- 
dued by the insatiable demand of harmony in man. 
The mountain of granite blooms into an eternal 
flower, with the lightness and delicate finish, as well 
as the aerial proportions and perspective, of vegetable 
beauty. 



HIS TOBY. 17 

In like manner, all public facts are to be individ- 
ualized, all private facts are to be generalized. Then 
at once History becomes fluid and true, and Biogra- 
phy deep and sublime. As the Persian imitated in 
the slender shafts and capitals of his architecture the 
stem and flower of the lotus and palm, so the Persian 
court in its magnificent era never gave over the 
nomadism of its barbarous tribes, but travelled from 
Ecbatana, where the spring was spent, to Susa in 
summer, and to Babylon for the winter. 

In the early history of Asia and Africa, Nomadism 
and Agriculture are the two antagonist facts. The ge- 
ography of Asia and of Africa necessitated a nomadic 
life. But the nomads were the terror of all those whom 
the soil, or the advantages of a market, had induced to 
build towns. Agriculture, therefore, was a religious 
injunction, because of the perils of the state from 
nomadism. And in these late and civil countries of 
England and America, these propensities still fight 
out the old battle in the nation and in the individual. 
The nomads of Africa were constrained to wander by 
the attacks of the gad-fly, which drives the cattle mad, 
and so compels the tribe to emigrate in the rainy sea- 
son, and to drive off the cattle to the higher sandy 
regions. The nomads of Asia follow the pasturage 
from month to month. In America and Europe, the 
nomadism is of trade and curiosity ; a progress, cer- 
tainly, from the gad-fly of Astaboras to the Anglo 
and Italo-mania of Boston Bay. Sacred cities, to 
which a periodical religious pilgrimage was enjoined, 
or stringent laws and customs, tending to invigorate 
i the national bond, were the check on the old rovers ; 

2 



1 8 ESSAY L 

and the cumulative values of long residence are the 
restraints on the itineracy of the present day. The 
antagonism of the two tendencies is not less active in 
individuals, as the love of adventure or the love of re- 
pose happens to predominate. A man of rude health 
and flowing spirits has the faculty of rapid domesti- 
cation, lives in his wagon, and roams through all lati- 
tudes as easily as a Calmuc. At sea, or in the forest, 
or in the snow, he sleeps as warm, dines with as good 
appetite, and associates as happily, as beside his own 
chimneys. Or perhaps his facility is deeper seated, in 
the increased range of his faculties of observation, 
which yield him points of interest wherever fresh ob- 
jects meet his eyes. The pastoral nations were needy 
and hungry to desperation ; and this intellectual 
nomadism, in its excess, bankrupts the mind, through 
the dissipation of power on a miscellany of objects. 
The home-keeping wit, on the other hand, is that 
continence or content which finds all the elements 
of life in its own soil ; and which has its own perils of 
monotony and deterioration, if not stimulated by for- 
eign infusions. 

Every thing the individual sees without him cor- 
responds to his states of mind, and every thing is in 
turn intelligible to him, as his onward thinking leads 
him into the truth to which that fact or series be- 
lonnjs. 

The primeval world, — the Tore- World, as the 
Germans say, — I can dive to it in myself as well as 
grope for it with researching fingers in catacombs, 
libraries, and the broken reliefs and torsos of ruined 
villas. 



HISTORY. 19 

What is the foundation of that interest all men feel 
in Greek history, letters, art, and poetry, in all its 
periods, from the Heroic or Homeric age down to the 
domestic life of the Athenians and Spartans, four or 
five centuries later '? What but this, that every man 
passes personally through a Grecian period. The 
Grecian state is the era of the bodily nature, the per- 
fection of the senses, — of the spiritual nature unfolded 
in strict unity with the body. In it existed those 
human forms which supplied the sculptor with his 
models of Hercules, Phoebus, and Jove ; not like the 
forms abounding in the streets of modern cities, 
wherein the face is a confused blur of features, but 
composed of incorrupt, sharply defined, and symmet- 
rical features, whose eye-sockets are so formed that it 
would be impossible for such eyes to squint, and take 
furtive glances on this side and on that, but they must 
turn the whole head. The manners of that period 
are plain and fierce. The reverence exhibited is for 
personal qualities, courage, address, self-command, 
justice, strength, swiftness, a loud voice, a broad 
chest. Luxury and elegance are not known. A 
sparse population and want make every man his own 
valet, cook, butcher, and soldier; and the habit of 
supplying his own needs educates the body to won- 
derful performances. Such are the Agamemnon and 
Diomed of Homer, and not far different is the picture 
Xenophon gives of himself and his compatriots in the 
Ketreat of the Ten Thousand. <' After the army had 
crossed the river Teleboas in Armenia, there fell 
much snow, and the troops lay miserably on the 
ground covered with it. But Xenophon arose naked. 



20 JSSSAY I. 

and, taking an axe, began to split wood ; whereupon 
others rose and did the like." Throughout his army- 
exists a boundless liberty of speech. They quarrel 
for plunder, they wrangle with the generals on each 
new order ; and Xenophon is as sharp-tongued as any, 
and sharper-tongued than most, and so gives as good 
as he gets. Who does not see that this is a gang of 
great boys, with such a code of honor and such lax 
discipline as great boys have ? 

The costly charm of the ancient tragedy, and indeed 
of all the old literature, is, that the persons speak sim- 
ply, — speak as persons who have great good sense 
without knowing it, before yet the reflective habit has 
become the predominant habit of the mind. Our ad- 
miration of the antique is not admiration of the old, 
but of the natural. The Greeks are not reflective, 
but perfect in their senses and in their health, with 
the finest physical organization in the world. Adults 
acted with the simplicity and grace of children. They 
made vases, tragedies, and statues, such as healthy 
senses should, — that is, in good taste. Such things 
have continued to be made in all ages, and are now 
wherever a healthy physique exists ; but, as a class, 
from their superior organization, they have surpassed 
all. They combine the energy of manhood with the en- 
gaging unconsciousness of childhood. The attraction 
of these manners is that they belong to man, and are 
known to every man in virtue of his being once a 
■ child ; besides that there are always individuals who 
retain these characteristics. A person of childlike 
genius and inborn energy is still a Greek, and revives 
our love of the Muse of Hellas. I admire the love of 



HISTORY. 21 

nature in the Philoctetes. In reading those fine apos- 
trophes to sleep, to the stars, rocks, mountains, and 
waves, I feel time passing away as an ebbing sea. I 
feel the eternity of man, the identity of his thought. 
The Greek had, it seems, the same fellow-beings as I. 
The sun and moon, water and fire, met his heart pre- 
cisely as they meet mine. Then the vaunted distinc- 
tion between Greek and English, between Classic and 
Komantic schools, seems superficial and pedantic. 
'When a thought of Plato becomes a thought to me, 
when a truth that fired the soul of Pindar fires mine, 
time is no more. When I feel that we two meet in a 
perception, that our two souls are tinged with the 
same hue, and do, as it were, run into one, why 
should I measure degrees of latitude, why should I 
count Egyptian years ? 

The student interprets the age of chivalry by his 
own age of chivalry, and the days of maritime adven- 
ture and circumnavigation by quite parallel miniature 
experiences of his own. To the sacred history of the 
world, he has the same key. When the voice of a 
prophet out of the deeps of antiquity merely echoes to 
him a sentiment of his infancy, a prayer of his youth, 
he then pierces to the truth through all the confusion 
of tradition and the caricature of institutions. 

Rare, extravagant spirits come by us at intervals, 
who disclose to us new facts in nature. I see that 
men of God have, from time to time, walked among 
men and made their commission felt in the heart and 
soul of the commonest hearer. Hence, evidently, the 
tripod, the priest, the priestess, inspired by the divine 
afflatus. 



22 , JSSSAY L 

Jesus astonishes and overpowers sensual people. 
They cannot unite him to history, or reconcile him with 
themselves. As they come to revere their intuitions 
and aspire to live holily, their own piety explains 
every fact, every word. 

How easily these old worships of Moses, of Zoroaster, 
of Menu, of Socrates, domesticate themselves in the 
mind. I cannot find any antiquity in them. They 
are mine as much as theirs. 

I have seen the first monks and anchorets without 
crossing seas or centuries. More than once some 
individual has appeared to me with such negligence of 
labor and such commanding contemplation, a haughty 
beneficiary, begging in the name of God, as made 
good to the nineteenth century Simeon the Sty lite, the 
Thebais, and the first Capuchins. 

The priestcraft of the East and "West, of the Ma- 
gian, Brahmin, Druid, and Inca, is expounded in the 
individuars private life. The cramping influence of 
a hard formalist on a young child in repressing his 
spirits and courage, paralyzing the understanding, 
and that without producing indignation, but only fear 
and obedience, and even much sympathy with the 
tyranny, — is a familiar fact explained to the child 
when he becomes a man, only by seeing that the 
oppressor Of his youth is himself a child tyrannized 
over by those names and words and forms, of whose 
influence he was merely the organ to the youth. The 
fact teaches him how Belus was worshipped, and how 
the Pyramids were built, better than the discovery by 
Champollion of the names of all the workmen and the 
cost of every tile. He finds Assyi^a and the Mounds 



HISTORY, 23 

of Cholula at his door, and himself has laid the 
courses. 

Again, in that protest which each considerate per- 
son makes against the superstition of his times, he 
repeats step for step the part of old reformers, and in 
the search after truth finds like them new perils to 
virtue. He learns again what moral vigor is needed 
to supply the girdle «f a superstition. A great licen- 
tiousness treads on the heels of a reformation- How 
many times in the history of the world has the Luther 
of the day had to lament the decay of piety in his OAvn 
household ! " Doctor," said his wife to Martin Lu- 
ther, one day, *' how is it that, whilst subject to papacy, 
we prayed so often and with such fervor, whilst now 
we pray with the utmost coldness and very seldom ? " 

The advancing man discovers how deep a property 
he has in literature, — in all fable as well as in all 
history. He finds that the poet was no odd fellow, 
who describes strange and impossible situations, but 
that universal man wrote by his pen a confession true 
for one and true for all. His own secret biography 
he finds in lines wonderfully intelligible to him, dot- 
ted down before he was born. One after another he 
comes up in his private adventures with every fable 
of ^sop, of Homer, of Hafiz, of Ariosto, of Chaucer, 
of Scott, and verifies them with his own head and 
hands. 

The beautiful fables of the Greeks, being proper 
creations of the imagination and not of the fancy, are 
universal verities. What a range of meanings and 
what perpetual pertinence has the story of Prome- 
theus ! Beside its primary value as the first chapter 



24 ESSAY I. 

of the history of Europe (the mythology thinly veiling 
authentic facts, the invention of the mechanic arts, and 
the migration of colonies), it gives the history of relig- 
ion with some closeness to the faith of later ages. 
Prometheus is the Jesus of the old mythology. He is 
the friend of man ; stands between the unjust "justice '* 
of the Eternal Father and the race of mortals, and 
readily suffers all things on their Recount. But where 
it departs from the Calvinistic Christianity, and exhib- 
its him as the defier of Jove, it represents a state of 
mind which readily appears wherever the doctrine of 
Theism is taught in a crude, objective form, and 
which seems the self-defence of man against this un- 
truth ; namely, a discontent with the believed fact that 
a God exists, and a feeling that the obligation of rev- 
erence is onerous. It would steal, if it could, the' fire 
of the Creator, and live apart from him and independ- 
ent of him. The Prometheus Vinctus is the romance 
of scepticism. Not less true to all time are the 
details of that stately apologue. Apollo kept the 
flocks of Admetus, said the poets. When the gods 
come among men, they are not known. Jesus was 
not; Socrates and Shakespeare were not. Antaeus 
was suffocated by the gripe of Hercules, but every 
time he touched his mother earth, his strength was 
renewed. Man is the broken giant, and, in all his 
weakness, both his body and his mind are invigorated 
by habits of conversation with nature. The power of 
music, the power of poetry to unfix, and, as it were, 
clap wings to solid nature, interprets the riddle of 
Orpheus. The philosophical perception of identity 
through endless mutations of form makes him know 



HISTORY. 25 

the Proteus. What else am I who laughed or wept 
yesterday, who slept last night like a corpse, and this 
morning stood and ran ? And what see I on any side 
but the transmigrations of Proteus ? I can symbolize 
my thought by using the name of any creature, of 
any fact, because every creature is man, agent, or 
patient. Tantalus is but a name for you and me. 
Tantalus means the impossibility of drinking the wa- 
ters of thought which are always gleaming and wav- 
ing within sight of the soul. The transmigration of 
souls is no fable. I would it were; but men and 
women are only half human. Every animal of the 
barn-yard, the field, and the forest, of the earth and 
of the waters that are under the earth, has contrived 
to get a footing and to leave the print of its features 
and form in some one or other of these upright, heaven- 
facing speakers. Ah ! brother, stop the ebb of thy 
soul, — ebbing downward into the forms into whose 
habits thou hast now for many years slid. As near 
and proper to us is also that old fable of the Sphinx, 
who was said to sit in the road-side and put riddles to 
every passenger. If the man could not answer, she 
swallowed him alive. If he could solve the riddle, the 
Sphinx was slain. What is our life but an endless 
flight of winged facts or events ? In splendid variety 
these changes come, all putting questions to the hu- 
man spirit. Those men who cannot answer by a 
superior wisdom these facts or questions of time, serve 
them. Facts encumber them, tyrannize over them, 
and make the men of routine the men of sense, in 
whom a literal obedience to facts has extinguished 
every spark of that light by which man is truly man. 



26 i:SSAY I. 

But if the man is true to his better instincts or senti- 
ments, and refuses the dominion of facts, as one that 
comes of a higher race, remains fast by the soul and 
sees the principle, then the facts fall aptly and supple 
into their places ; they know their master, and the 
meanest of them glorifies him. 

See in Goethe's Helena the same desire that every 
word should be a thing. These figures, he would say, 
these Chirons, Griffins, Phorkyas, Helen, and Leda, 
are somewhat, and do exert a specific influence on the 
mind. So far then are they eternal entities, as real 
to-day as in the first Olympiad. Much revolving them, 
he writes out freely his humor, and gives them body 
to his own imagination. And although that poem be 
as vague and fantastic as a dream, yet is it much more 
attractive than the more regular dramatic pieces of the 
same author, for the reason that it operates a wonderful 
relief to the mind from the routine of customary images, 
— awakens the reader's invention and fancy by the wild 
freedom of the design, and by the unceasing succession 
of brisk shocks of surprise. 

The universal nature, too strong for the petty nature 
of the bard, sits on his neck and writes through his hand ; 
so that when he seems to vent a mere caprice and wild 
romance, the issue is an exact allegory. Hence Plato 
said that " poets utter great and wise things which they 
do not themselves understand." All the fictions of the 
Middle Age explain themselves as a masked or frolic 
expression of that which in grave earnest the mind of 
that period toiled to achieve. Magic, and all that is 
ascribed to it, is a deep presentiment of the powers of 
science. The shoes of swiftness, the sword of sharpness, 



HISTORY, 27 

the power of subduing the elements, of using the secret 
virtues of minerals, of understanding the voices of birds, 
are the obscure efforts of the mind in a right direction. 
The preternatural prowess of the hero, the gift of per- 
petual youth, and the like, are alike the endeavor of the 
human spirit " to bend the shows of things to the desires 
of the mind." 

In Perceforest and Amadis de Gaul, a garland and 
a rose bloom on the head of h-er who is faithful, and 
fade on the brow of the inconstant. In the story of 
the Boy and the Mantle, even a mature reader may 
be surprised with a glow of virtuous pleasure at the 
triumph of the gentle Genelas ; and, indeed, all the 
postulates of elfin annals, — that the fairies do not 
like to be named ; that their gifts are capricious and 
not to be trusted ; that who seeks a treasure must 
not speak ; and the like, — I find true in Concord, 
however they might be in Cornwall or Bretagne. 

Is it otherwise in the newest romance ? I read the 
Bride of Lammermoor. Sir William Ashton is a 
mask for a vulgar temptation, Ravenswood Castle a 
fine name for proud poverty, and the foreign mission 
of state only a Bunyan disguise for honest industry. 
We may all shoot a wild bull that would toss the 
good and beautiful, by fighting down the unjust and 
sensual. Lucy Ashton is another name for fidelity, 
which is always beautiful and always liable to calam- 
ity in this world. 

But along with the civil and metaphysical history 
of man, another history goes daily forward, — that of 
the external world, — in which he is not less strictly 



28 ESSAY L 

implicated. He is the compend of time ; he is also 
the correlative of nature. His power consists in the 
multitude of his affinities, in the fact that his life is 
intertwined with the whole chain of organic and inor- 
ganic being. In old Eome the public roads begin- 
ning at the Forum proceeded north, south, east, west, 
to the centre of every province of the empire, making 
each market-town of Persia, Spain, and Britain per- 
vious to the soldiers of the capital : so out of the hu- 
man heart go, as it were, highways to the heart of 
every object in nature, to reduce it under the domin- 
ion of man. A man is a bundle of relations, a knot 
of roots, whose flower and fruitage is the world. His 
faculties refer to natures out of him, and predict the 
world he is to inhabit, as the fins of the fish foreshow 
that water exists, or the wings of an eagle in the egg 
presuppose air. He cannot live without a world. 
Put Napoleon in an island prison, let his faculties 
find no men to act on, no Alps to climb, no stake to 
play for, and he would beat the air and appear stu- 
pid. Transport him to large countries, dense popu- 
lation, complex interests, and antagonist power, and 
you shall see that the man Napoleon, bounded, that 
is, by such a profile and outline, is not the virtual 
Napoleon. This is but Talbot's shadow ; 

" His substance is not here. 
For what you see is but the smallest part 
And least proportion of humanity *, 
But were the -whole frame here, 
It is of such a spacious, lofty pitch, 
Your roof were not sufficient to contain it." 

Henry VI. 

Columbus needs a planet to shape his course upon. 



HISTORY. 



29 



Newton and Laplace need myriads of ages and thick- 
strewn celestial areas. One may say a gravitating 
solar system is already prophesied in the nature of 
Newton's mind. Not less does the brain of Davy or 
of Gay-Lussac, from childhood exploring the affini- 
ties and repulsions of particles, anticipate the laws of 
organization. Does not the eye of the human em- 
bryo predict the light ? the ear of Handel predict the 
witchcraft of harmonic sound ? Do not the construc- 
tive fingers of Watt, Fulton, Whittemore, Arkwright, 
predict the fusible, hard, aud temperable texture of 
metals, the properties of stone, water, and wood ? Do 
not the lovely attributes of the maiden child predict 
the refinements and decorations of civil society? 
Here also we are reminded of the action of man on 
man. A mind might ponder its thought for ages, 
and not gain so much self-knowledge as the passion 
of love shall teach it in a day. Who knows himself 
before he has been thrilled with indignation at an out- 
rage, or has heard an eloquent tongue, or has shared 
the throb of thousands in a national exultation or 
alarm 1 No man can antedate his experience, or 
guess what faculty or feeling a new object shall un- 
lock, any more than he can draw to-day the face of a 
person whom he shall see to-morrow for the first 
time. 

I will not now go behind the general statement to 
explore the reason of this correspondency. Let it 
suffice that in the light of these two facts, namely, 
that the mind is One, and that nature is its correla- 
tive, history is to be read and written. 

Thus in all ways does the soul concentrate and re- 



30 ESSAY I. 

produce its treasures for each pupil. He, too, shall 
pass through the whole cycle of experience. He shall 
collect into a focus the rays of nature. History no 
longer shall be a dull book. If shall walk incarnate 
in every just and wise man. You shall not tell me 
by languages and titles a catalogue of the volumes 
you have read. You shall make me feel what periods 
you have lived. A man shall be the Temple of 
Fame. He shall walk, as the poets have described 
that goddess, in a robe painted all over with wonder- 
ful events and experiences ; ~ his own form and fea- 
tures by their exalted intelligence shall be that varie- 
gated vest. I shall find in him the Foreworld ; in his 
childhood the Age of Gold; the Apples of Knowl- 
edge; the Argonautic Expedition; the calling of 
Abraham ; the building of the Temple ; the Advent 
of Christ ; Dark Ages ; the Revival of Letters ; the 
Reformation ; the discovery of new lands ; the open- 
ing of new sciences, and new regions in man. He 
shall be the priest of Pan, and bring with him into 
humble cottages the blessing of the morning stars 
and all the recorded benefits of heaven and earth. 

Is there somewhat overweening in this claim? 
Then I reject all I have written, for what is the use 
of pretending to know what we know not 1 But it is 
the fault of our rhetoric that we cannot strongly state 
one fact without seeming to belie some other. I hold 
our actual knowledge very cheap. Hear the rats in 
the wall, see the lizard on the fence, the fungus under 
foot, the lichen on the log. "What do I know sympa- 
thetically, morally, of either of these w^orlds of life ? 
As old as the Caucasian man, — perhaps older — 



HISTORY, 31 

these creatures have kept their counsel beside him, 
and there is no record of any word or sign that has 
passed from one to the other. What connection do 
the books show between the fifty or sixty chemical 
elements and the historical eras? Nay, what does 
history yet record of the metaphysical annals of man ? 
What "light does it shed on those mysteries which we 
hide under the names Death and Immortality 1 Yet 
every history should be written in a wisdom which 
divined the range of our affinities and looked at facts 
as symbols. I am ashamed to see what a shallow 
village tale our so-called History is. How many 
times we must say Eome, and Paris, and Constanti- 
nople ! What does Eome know of rat and lizard ? 
What are Olympiads and Consulates to these neigh- 
boring systems of being ? Nay, what food or experi- 
ence or succor have they for the Esquimaux seal- 
hunter, for the Kanaka in his canoe, for the fisher- 
man, the stevedore, the porter ? 

Broader and deeper we must write our annals, — 
from an ethical reformation, from an influx of the 
ever new, ever sanative conscience, — if we would 
trulier express our central and wide-related nature, 
instead of this old chronology of selfishness and pride 
to which we have too long lent our eyes. Already 
that day exists for us, shines in on us at unawares ; 
but the path of science and of letters is not the way 
into nature. The idiot, the Indian, the child, and 
unschooled farmer's boy, stand nearer to the light by 
which nature is to be read, than the dissector or the 
antiquary. 



SELF-RELIANCE. 



"Ne te quaesiveris extra." 



" Man is his own star j and the soul that can 
Render an honest and a perfect man 
Commands all light, all influence, all fate 5 
Nothing to him falls early or too late. 
Our acts our angels are, or good or ill, 
Our fatal shadows that walk by us still." 
Epilogue to Beaumont and Fletclier''s Honest Man's Fortune, 



Cast the bantling on the rocks, 
Suckle him with the she-wolf's teat ; 
Wintered with the hawk and fox. 
Power and speed be hands and feei. 



ESSAY n. 



SELF-RELIANCE. 




EEAD the other day some verses written 
by an eminent painter, which were original 
and not conventional. The soul always 
hears an admonition in such lines, let the 
subject be what it may. The sentiment they instil is 
of more value than any thought they may contain. 
To believe your own thought, to believe that what is 
true for you in your private heart is true for all men, — 
that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it 
shall be the universal sense ; for the inmost in due 
time becomes the outmost, — and our first thought is 
rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last Judg- 
ment. Familiar as the voice of the mind is to each, 
the highest merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato, and 
Milton is, that they set at naught books and tradi- 
tions, and spoke not what men but what they thought. 
A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam 
of light which flashes across his mind from within, 
more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and 
sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, 
because it is his. In every work of genius we recog- 
nize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to 



36 ESSAY II. 

us with a certain alienated majesty. Great works of 
art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. 
They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impres- 
sion with good-humored inflexibility then most when 
the whole cry of voices is on the other side. Else, to- 
morrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense 
precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, 
and we shall be forced to take with shame our own 
opinion from another. 

There is a time in every man's education when he 
arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance ; that 
imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for 
better, for worse, as his portion ; that though the wide 
universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn 
can come to him but through his toil bestowed on 
that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The 
power which resides in him is new in nature, and 
none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor 
does he know until he has tried. Not for nothing one 
face, one character, one fact, makes much impression 
on him, and another none. This sculpture in the 
memory is not without pre-established harmony. The 
eye was placed where one ray should fall, that it 
might testify of that particular ray. We but half 
express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea 
which each of us represents. It may be safely trusted 
as proportionate and of good issues, so it be faithfully 
imparted, but God will not have his work made mani- 
fest by cowards. A man is relieved and gay when he 
has put his heart into his work and done his best ; 
but what he has said or done otherwise shall give 
him no peace. It is a deliverance which does not 



SELF-^RELIANCE, 37 

deliver. In the attempt his genius deserts him ; no 
muse befriends, no invention, no hope. 

Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron 
string. Accept the place the Divine Providence has 
found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the 
connection of events. Great men have always done 
so, and confided themselves childlike to the genius of 
their age, betraying their perception that the absolutely 
trustworthy was seated at their heart, working through 
their hands, predominating in all their being. And 
we are now men, and must accept in the highest mind 
the same transcendent destiny ; and not minors and 
invalids in \a protected corner, not cowards fleeing 
before a revolution, but guides, redeemers, and bene- 
factors, obeying the Almighty effort, and advancing 
on Chaos and the Dark. 

What pretty oracles nature yields us on this text, 
in the face and behavior of children, babes, and even 
brutes ! That divided and rebel mind, that distrust 
of a sentiment because our arithmetic has computed 
the strength and means opposed to our purpose, these 
have not. Their mind being whole, their eye is as 
yet unconquered, and when we look in their faces, we 
are disconcerted. Infancy conforms to nobody : all 
conform to it, so that^ one babe commonly makes four 
or five out of the adults who prattle and play to it. 
So God has armed youth and puberty and manhood 
no less with its own piquancy and charm, and made 
it enviable and gracious and its claims not to be put 
by, if it will stand by itself. Do not think the youth 
has no force, because he cannot speak to you and me. 
Hark ! in the next room his voice is sufficiently clear 



38 E^SAY IL 

and emphatic. It seems he knows how to speak to 
his contemporaries. Bashful or bold, then, he will 
know how to make us seniors very unnecessary. 

The nonchalance of* boys who are sure of a dinner, 
and would disdain as much as a lord to do or say 
aught to conciliate one, is the healthy attitude of 
human nature. A boy is in the parlor what the pit 
is in the playhouse ; independent, irresponsible, look- 
ing out from his corner on such people and facts as 
pass by, he tries and sentences them on their merits, 
in the swift, summary way of boys, as good, bad, 
interesting, silly, eloquent, troublesome. He cumbers 
himself never about consequences, about interests ; 
he gives an independent, genuine verdict. You must 
court him : he does not court you. But the man is, 
as it were, clapped into jail by his consciousness. As 
soon as he has once acted or spoken with eclat, he is 
a committed person, watched by the sympathy or the 
hatred of hundreds, whose affections must now enter 
into his account. There is no Lethe for this. Ah, 
that he could pass again into his neutrality ! Who 
can thus avoid all pledges, and having observed, ob- 
serve again from the same unaffected, unbiased, un- 
' bribable, unaffrighted innocence, must always be for- 
midable. He would utter opinions on all passing 
affairs, which, being seen to be not private, but neces- 
sary, would sink like darts into the ear of men, and 
put them in fear. 

These are the voices which we hear in solitude, but 
they grow faint and inaudible as we enter into the 
world. Society everywhere is in conspiracy against 
the manhood of every one of its members. Society 



SELF-RELIANCE, 39 

is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, 
for the better securing of his bread to each share- 
holder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the 
eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. 
Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and 
creators, but names and customs. 

Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. 
He who would gather immortal palms must not be 
hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore 
if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the 
integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to your- 
self, and you shall have the suffrage of the world. I 
remember an' answer which when quite young I was 
prompted to make to a valued adviser, who was wont 
to importune me with the dear old doctrines of the 
Church. On my saying. What have I to do with the 
sacredness of traditions, if I live wholly from within ? 
my friend suggested, "But these impulses may be 
from below, not from above." I replied, " They do 
not seem to me to be such ; but if I am the Devil's 
child, I will live then from the Devil." No law can 
be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and 
bad are but names very readily transferable to that or 
this ; the only right is what is after my constitution, 
the only wrong what is against it. A man is to carry 
himself in the presence of all opposition as if every 
thing were titular and ephemeral but he. I am 
ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges 
and names, to large societies and dead institutions. 
Every decent and well-spoken individual affects and 
sways me more than is right. I ought to go upright 
and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways. If 



40 -ESSAY 11. 

malice and vanity wear the coat of philanthropy, shall 
that pass ? If an angry bigot assumes this bountiful 
cause of Abolition, and comes to me with his last 
news from Barbadoes, why should I not say to him, 
" Go love thy infant ; love thy wood-chopper ; be 
good-natured and modest ; have that grace ; and 
never varnish your hard, uncharitable ambition Avith 
this incredible tenderness for black folk a thousand 
miles off. Thy love afar is spite at home." Eough 
and graceless would be such greeting, but truth is 
handsomer than the affectation of love. Your good- 
ness must have some edge to it, — else it is none. 
The doctrine of hatred must be preached as the coun- 
teraction of the doctrine of love when that pules and 
whines. I shun father and mother and wife an(3 
brother, when my genius calls me. I would write on 
the lintels of the door-post. Whim. I hope it is 
somewhat better than whim at last, but we cannot 
spend the day in explanation. Expect me not to 
show cause why I seek or why I exclude company. 
Then, again, do not tell me, as a good man did to- 
day, of my obligation to put all poor men in good 
situations. Are they mz/ poor ? I tell thee, thou 
foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the 
dime, the cent, I give to such men as do not belong 
to me and to whom I do not belong. There is a class 
of persons to whom by all spiritual affinity I am 
bought and sold ; for them I will go to prison, if need 
be ; but your miscellaneous popular charities ; the ed- 
ucation at college of fools ; the building of meeting- 
houses to the vain end to which many now stand ; 
alms to sots ; and the thousandfold Belief Societies ; -^ 



SELF-RELIANCE. 41 

though I confess with shame I sometimes succumb and 
give the dollar, it is a wicked dollar which by and by 
I shall have the manhood to withhold. 

Virtues are, in the popular estimate, rather the ex- 
ception than the rule. There is the man and his 
virtues. Men do what is called a good action, as 
some piece of courage or charity, much as they would 
pay a fine in expiation of daily non-appearance on 
parade. Their works are done as an apology or ex- 
tenuation of their living in the world, — as invalids 
and the insane pay a high board. Their virtues are 
penances. I do not wish to expiate, but to live. My 
life is for itself and not for a spectacle. I much pre- 
fer that it should be of a lower strain, so it be genuine 
and equal, than that it should be glittering and un- 
steady. I wish it to be sound and sweet, and not to 
need diet and bleeding. I ask primary evidence that 
you are a man, and refuse this appeal from the man 
to his actions. I know that for myself it makes no 
difference whether I do or forbear those actions which 
are reckoned excellent. I cannot consent to pay for 
a privilege where I have intrinsic right. Few and 
mean as my gifts may be, I actually am, and do not 
need for my own assurance or the assurance of my 
fellows any secondary testimony. 

What I must do is all that concerns me, not what 
the people think. This rule, equally arduous in act- 
ual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole 
distinction between greatness and meanness. It is 
the harder, because you will always find those who 
think they know what is your duty better than you 
know it. It is easy in the world to live after the 



42 ESSAY 11. 

world's opinion ; it is easy in solitude to live after our 
own ; but the great man is he who, in the midst of the 
crowd, keeps with perfect sweetness the independence 
of solitude. 

The objection to conforming to usages that have 
become dead to you is, that it scatters your force. 
It loses your time and blurs the impression of your 
character. If you maintain a dead church, contribute 
to a dead Bible-society, vote with a great party either 
for the government or against it, spread your table 
like base housekeepers, — under all these screens I 
have difficulty to V detect the precise m*an you are. 
And, of course, so much force is withdrawn from your 
proper life. But do your work, and I shall know you. 
Do your work, and you shall reinforce yourself. A 
man must consider what a blindman's-buff is this game 
of conformity. If I know your sect, I anticipate your 
argument. I hear a preacher announce for his text 
and topic the expediency of one of the institutions of 
his church. Do I not know beforehand that not pos- 
sibly can he say a new and spontaneous word ? Do I 
not know that, with all this\ostentation of examining 
the grounds of the institution, he will do no such 
thing ? Do I not know that he is pledged to himself 
not to look but at one side, — the permitted side, not 
as a man, but as a parish minister '? He is a retained 
attorney, and these airs of the bench are the emptiest 
affectation. Well, most men have bound their eyes 
Avith one or another handkerchief, and attached them- 
selves to some one of these communities of opinion. 
This conformity makes them not false in a few partic- 
ulars, authors of a few lies, but false in all particulars. 



SELF-RELIANCE. 43 

Their every truth is not quite true. Their two is not 
the real two, their four not the real four ; so that 
every word they say chagrins us, and we know not 
where to begin to set them right. Meantime nature 
is not slow to equip us in the prison-uniform of the 
party to which we adhere. We come to wear one cut 
of face and figure, and acquire by degrees the gentlest 
asinine expression. There is a mortifying experience 
in particular, which does not fail to wreak itself also 
in the general history ; I mean " the foolish face of 
praise," the forced smile which we put on in company 
where we do not feel at ease in answer to conversation 
which does not interest us. The muscles, not sponta- 
neously moved, but moved by a low usurping wilful- 
ness, grow tight about the outline of the face with the 
most disagreeable sensation. 

For nonconformity the world whips you with its dis- 
pleasure. And therefore a man must know how to 
estimate a sour face. The by-standers look askance 
on him in the public street or in the friend's parlor. 
If this aversation had its origin in contempt and resist- 
ance like his own, he might well go home with a sad 
countenance ; but the sour faces of the multitude, like 
their sw^eet faces, have no deep cause, but are put on 
and off as the wind blows and a newspaper directs. 
Yet is the discontent of the multitude more formidable 
than that of the senate and the college. It is easy 
enough for a firm man who knows the world to brook 
the rage of the cultivated classes. Their rage is deco- 
rous and prudent, for they are timid as being very 
vulnerable themselves. But when to their feminine 
rage the indignation of the people is added, when the 



44 JESSAY 11, 

ignorant and the poor are aroused, when the unintel- 
ligent brute force that lies at the bottom of society is 
made to growl and mow, it needs the habit of magna- 
nimity and religion to treat it godlike as a trifle of 
no concernment. 

The other terror that scares us from self-trust is 
our consistency ; a reverence for our past act or word, 
because the eyes of others have no other data for com- 
puting our orbit than our past acts, and we are loath 
to disappoint them. 

But why should you keep your head over your 
shoulder ? Why drag about this corpse of your mem- 
ory, lest you contradict somewhat you have stated in 
this or that public place ? Suppose you should con- 
tradict yourself ; what then? It seems to be a rule 
of wisdom never to rely on your memory alone, 
scarcely even in acts of pure memory, but to bring the 
past for judgment into the thousand-eyed present, and 
live ever in a new day. In your metaphysics you have 
denied personality to the Deity ; yet when the devout 
motions of the soul come, yield to them heart and life, 
though they should clothe God with shape and color. 
Leave your theory, as Joseph his coat in the hand of 
the harlot, and flee. 

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little 
minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers 
and divines. With consistency a great soul has sim- 
ply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself 
with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think 
now in hard words ; and to-morrow speak what to- 
morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contra- 
dict everything you said to-day. — " Ah, so you shall 



SELF-RELIANCE. 45 

be sure to be misunderstood." — Is it so bad, then, to 
be misunderstood '? Pythagoras was misunderstood, 
and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, 
and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise 
spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be mis- 
understood. 

I suppose no man can violate his nature. All the 
sallies of his will are rounded in by the law of his be- 
ing, as the inequalities of Andes and Himmaleh are in- 
significant in the curve of the sphere. Nor does it mat- 
ter how you gauge and try him. A character is like 
an acrostic or Alexandrian stanza, — read it forward, 
backward, or across, it still spells the same thing. In 
this pleasing, contrite wood-life which God allows me, 
let me record day by day my honest thought without 
prospect or retrospect, and, I cannot doubt, it will be 
found symmetrical, though I mean it not and see it 
not. My book should smell of pines and resound 
with the hum of insects. The swallow over my win- 
dow should interweave that thread or straw he carries 
in his bill into my web also. We pass for what we 
are. Character teaches above our wills. Men imag- 
ine that they communicate their virtue or vice only 
by overt actions, and do not see that virtue or vice 
emit a breath every moment. 

There will be an agreement in whatever variety of 
actions', so they be each honest and natural in their 
hour. For of one will, the actions will be harmoni- 
ous, however unlike they seem. These varieties are 
lost sight of at a little distance, at a little height of 
thought. One tendency unites them all. The voy- 
age of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred 



46 ESSAY IL 

tacks. See the line from a sufficient distance, and it 
straightens itself to the average tendency. Your gen- 
uine action will explain itself, and will explain your 
other genuine actions. Your conformity explains 
nothing. Act singly, and what you have already 
done singly will justify you now. Greatness appeals 
to the future. If I can be firm enough to-day to do 
right, and scorn eyes, I must have done so much 
right before as to defend me now. Be it how it will, 
do right now. Always scorn appearances, and you 
always may. The force of character is cumulative. 
All the foregone days of virtue work their health into 
this. What makes the majesty of the heroes of the 
senate and the field, which so fills the imagination ? 
The consciousness of a train of great days and victo- 
ries behind. They shed an united light on the ad- 
vancing actor. He is attended as by a visible escort 
of angels. That is it which throws thunder into 
Chatham's voice, and dignity into Washington's port, 
and America into Adams's eye. Honor is venerable 
to us because it is no ephemeris. It is always ancient 
virtue. We worship it to-day because it is not of to- 
day. We love it and pay it homage, because it is 
not a trap for our love and homage, but is self-de- 
pendent, self-derived, and therefore of an old immacu- 
late pedigree, even if shown in a young person. 

I hope in these days we have heard the last of con- 
formity and consistency. Let the words be gazetted 
and ridiculous henceforward. Instead of the gong 
for dinner, let us hear a whistle from the Spartan fife. 
Let us never bow and apologize more. A great man 
is coming to eat at my house. I do not wish to 



self-reliance, 47 

please him ; I wish that he should wish to please me. 
I will stand here for humanity, and though I would 
make it kind, I would make it true. Let us affront 
and reprimand the smooth mediocrity and squalid 
contentment of the times, and hurl in the face of cus- 
tom, and trade, and office, the fact which is the up- 
shot of all history, that there is a great responsible 
Thinker and Actor working wherever a man works ; 
that a true man belongs to no other time or place, but 
is the centre of things. Where he is, there is nature. 
He measures you, and all men, and all events. Or- 
dinarily, every body in society reminds us of some- 
what else, or of some other person. Character, real- 
ity, reminds you of nothing else ; it takes place of the 
whole creation. The man must be so much, that he 
must make all circumstances indifferent. Every true 
man is a cause, a country, and an age; requires in- 
finite spaces and numbers and time fully to accom- 
plish his design ; — and posterity seem to follow, his 
steps as a train of clients. A man Caesar is born, 
and for ages after we have a Roman Empire. Christ 
is born, and millions of minds so grow and cleave to 
his genius, that he is confounded with virtue and the 
possible of man. An institution is the lengthened 
shadow of one man; as, Monachism, of the Hermit 
Antony ; the Reformation, of Luther ; Quakerism, of 
!Fox ; Methodism, of Wesley ; Abolition, of Clarkson. 
Scipio, Milton called " the height of Rome " ; and all 
history resolves itself very easily into the biography 
of a few stout and earnest persons. 

Let a man then know his worth, and keep things 
under his feet. Let him not peep or steal, or skulk 



48 ESSAY IL 

up and down with the air of a charity-boy, a bastard, 
or an interloper, in the world which exists for him. 
But the man in the street, finding no worth in himself 
which corresponds to the force which built a tower or 
sculptured a marble god, feels poor when he looks on 
these. To him a palace, a statue, or a costly book 
have an alien and forbidding air, much like a gay equi- 
page, and seem to say like that, " Who are you, Sir ? '' 
Yet they all are his, suitors for his notice, petitioners 
to his faculties, that they will come out and take posses- 
sion. The picture waits for my verdict ; it is not to 
command me, but I am to settle its claims to praise. 
That popular fable of the sot who was picked up dead 
drunk in the street, carried to the duke's house, washed 
and dressed and laid in the duke's bed, and, on his 
waking, treated with all obsequious ceremony like the 
duke, and assured that he had been insane, owes its 
popularity to the fact, that it symbolizes so well the 
state of man, who is in the world a sort of sot, but 
now and then wakes up, exercises his reason, and finds 
himself a true prince. 

Our reading is mendicant and sycophantic. In 
history, our imagination plays us false. Kingdom 
and lordship, power and estate, are a gaudier vocabu- 
lary than private John and Edward in a small house 
and common day's work ; but the things of life are 
the same to both ; the sum total of both is the same. 
Why all this deference to Alfred, and Scandcrbeg, 
and Gustavus ? Suppose they were virtuous ; did 
they wear out virtue 1 As great a stake depends on 
your private act to-day, as followed their public and 
renowned steps. When private men shall act with 



SELF-RELIANCE, 49 

original views, the lustre will be transferred from the 
actions of kings to those of gentlemen. 

The world has been instructed by its kings, who 
have so magnetized the eyes of nations. It has been 
taught by this colossal symbol the mutual reverence 
that is due from man to man. The joyful loyalty 
with which men have everywhere suffered the king, 
the noble, or the great proprietor to walk among them 
by a law of his own, make his own scale of men and 
things, and reverse theirs, pay for benefits not with 
money but with honor, and represent the law in his 
person, w^as the hieroglyphic by which they obscurely 
signified their consciousness of their own right and 
comeliness, the right of every man. 

The magnetism which all original action exerts is 
explained when we inquire the reason of self-trust. 
Who is the Trustee? What is the aboriginal Self, 
on which a universal reliance may be grounded 1 
What is the nature and power of that science-baffling 
star, without parallax, without calculable elements, 
which shoots a ray of beauty even into trivial and im- 
pure actions, if the least mark of independence appear ? 
The inquiry leads us to that source, at once the 
essence of genius, of virtue, and of life, which we 
call Spontaneity or Instinct. We denote this primary 
wisdom as Intuition, whilst all later teachings are 
tuitions. In that deep force, the last fact behind ' 
which analysis cannot go, all things find their com- 
mon origin. For, the sense of being which in calm 
hours rises, we know not how, in the soul, is not 
diverse from things, from space, from light, from time, 
from man, but one with them, and proceeds obviously 
4 



50 ESSAY IL 

from the same source whence their life and being also 
proceed. We first share the life by which things 
exist, and afterwards see them as appearances in 
nature, and forget that we have shared their cause. 
Here is the fountain of action and of thought. Here 
are the lungs of that inspiration which giveth man 
wisdom, and which cannot be denied without impiety 
and atheism. We lie in the lap of immense intelli- 
gence, which makes us receivers of its truth and 
organs of its activity. When we discern justice, 
when we discern truth, we do nothing of ourselves, 
but allow a passage to its beams. If we ask whence 
this comes, if we seek to pry into the soul that causes, 
all philosophy is at fault. Its presence or its absence 
is all we can affirm. Every man discriminates* be- 
tween the voluntary acts of his mind and his involun- 
tary perceptions, and knows that to his involuntary 
perceptions a perfect faith is due. He may err in the 
expression of them, but he knows that these things 
are so, like day and night, not to be disputed. My 
wilful actions and acquisitions are but roving ; — the 
idlest reverie, the faintest native emotion, command 
my curiosity and respect. Thoughtless people con- 
tradict as readily the statement of perceptions as of 
opinions, or rather much more readily ; for, they do 
not distinguish between perception and notion. They 
fancy that I choose to see this or that thing. But 
perception is not whimsical, but fatal. If I see a 
trait, my children will see it after me, and in course 
of time, all mankind, — although it may chance that 
no one has seen it before me. For my perception of 
it is as much a fact as the sun. 



SELF-RELIANCE. 51 

The relations of the soul to the divine spirit are so 
pure that it is profane to seek to interpose helps. It 
must be that when God speaketh he should commu- 
nicate, not one thing, but all things ; should fill the 
world with his voice ; should scatter forth light, na- 
ture, time, souls, from the centre of the present 
thought ; and new date and new create the whole. 
Whenever a mind is simple, and receives a divine 
wisdom, old things pass away, — meJCns, teachers, 
texts, temples fall ; it lives now, and absorbs past and 
future into the present hour. All things are made 
sacred by relation to it, — one as much as another. 
All things are dissolved to their centre by their cause, 
and, in the universal miracle, petty and particular 
miracles disappear. If, therefore, a man claims to 
know and speak of God, and carries you backward to 
the phraseology of some old mouldered nation in 
another country, in Another world, believe him not. 
Is the acorn better than the oak which is its fulness 
and completion ? Is the parent better than the child 
into whom he has cast his ripened being 1 Whence, 
then, this worship of the pasf? The centuries are 
conspirators against the sanity and authority of the 
soul. Time and space are but physiological colors 
which the eye makes, but the soul is light ; where it 
is, is day ; where it was, is night ; and history is an 
impertinence and an. injury, if it be anything more 
than a cheerful apologue or parable of my being and 
becoming. 

Man is timid and apologetic ; he is no longer 
upright ; he dares not say " I think,^' " I am,^^ but 
quotes some saint or sage. He is ashamed before the 



52 ESSAY II, 

blade of grass or the blowing rose. These roses un- 
der my window make no reference to former roses or 
to better ones ; they are for what they are ; they exist 
with God to-day. There is no time to them. There 
is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of 
its existence. Before a leaf-bud has burst, its whole 
life acts ; in the full-blown flower there is no more ; 
in the leafless root there is no less. Its nature is sat- 
isfied, and it satisfies nature, in all moments alike. 
But man postpones or remembers : he does not live 
in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past, 
or, heedless of the riches that surround him, stands 
on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot be happy 
and strong until he too lives with nature in the pres- 
ent, above time. 

This should be plain enough. Yet see what strong 
intellects dare not yet hear God himself, unless he 
speak the phraseology of I know not what David, or 
Jeremiah, or Paul. We shall not always set so great 
a price on a few texts, on a few lives. We are like 
children who repeat by rote the sentences of grandames 
and tutors, and, as they grow older, of the men of 
talents and character they chance to see, — painfully 
recollecting the exact words they spoke ; afterwards, 
when they come into the point of view which those 
had who uttered these sayings, they understand them, 
and are willing to let the words go ; for, at any time, 
they can use words as good when occasion comes. 
If we live truly, we shall see truly. It is as easy for 
the strong man to be strong as it is for the weak to 
be weak. When we have new perception, we shall 
gladly disburden the memory of its hoarded treasures 



SELF-RELIAN CE. 5 3 

as old rubbish. When a man lives with God, his 
voice shall be as sweet as the murmur of the brook 
and the rustle of the corn. 

And now at last the highest truth on this subject 
remains unsaid, probably cannot be said ; for all that 
we say is the far-off remembering of the intuition. 
That thought, by what I can now nearest approach to 
say it, is this. When good is near you, when you 
have life in yourself, it is not by any known or accus- 
tomed way ; you shall not discern the footprints of 
any other ; you shall not see the face of man ; you 
shall not hear any name ; — the way, the thought, the 
good, shall be wholly strange and new. It shall ex- 
clude example and experience. You take the way 
from man, not to man. All persons that ever existed 
are its forgotten ministers. Fear and hope are alike 
beneath it. There is somewhat low even in hope. In 
the hour of vision, there is nothing that can be called 
gratitude, nor properly joy. The soul raised over 
passion beholds identity and eternal causation, per- 
ceives the self-existence of Truth and Right, and 
calms itself with knowing that all things go vvcll. 
Vast spaces of nature, the Atlantic Ocean, the South 
Sea, — long intervals of time, years, centuries, — are 
of no account. This which I think and feel underlay 
vjvery former state of life and circumstances, as it does 
underlie my present, and what is called life, and what 
is called death. 

Life only avails, not the having lived. Power 
ceases in the instant of repose ; it resides in the mo- 
ment of transition from a past to a new state, in the 
shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim. This 



54 ESSAY 11. 

one fact the world hates, that the soul becomes; for 
that for ever degrades the past, turns all riches to 
poverty, all reputation to a shame, confounds the saint 
v^ith the rogue, shoves Jesus and Judas equally aside. 
Why, then, do we prate of self-reliance ? Inasmuch 
as the soul is present, there will be power not confi- 
dent but agent. To talk of reliance is a poor ex- 
ternal way of speaking. Speak rather of that which 
relies, because it works and is. Who has more obe- 
dience than I masters me, though he should not raise 
his finger. Round him I must revolve by the gravi- 
tation of spirits. We fancy it rhetoric, when we 
speak of eminent virtue. We do not yet see that 
virtue is Height, and that a man or a company of men, 
plastic and permeable to principles, by the law of 
nature must overpower and ride all cities, nations, 
kings, rich men, poets, who are not. 

This is the ultimate fact which we so quickly reach 
on this, as on every topic, the resolution of all into the 
ever-blessed one. Self-existence is the attribute of 
the Supreme Cause, and it constitutes the measure 
of good by the degree in which it enters into all lower 
forms. All things real are so by so much virtue as 
they contain. Commerce, husbandry, hunting, whal- 
ing, war, eloquence, personal weight, are somewhat, 
and engage my respect as examples of its presence 
and impure action. I see the same law working in 
nature for conservation and growth. Power is in 
nature the essential measure of right. Nature suffers 
nothing to remain in her kingdoms which cannot help 
itself. The genesis and maturation of a planet, its 
poise and orbit, the bended tree recovering itself from 



SELF-RELIANCE. 55 

the strong wind, the vital resources of every animal 
and vegetable, are demonstrations of the self-sufficing 
and therefore self-relying soul. 

Thus all concentrates : let us not rove ; let us sit 
at home with the cause. Let us stun and astonish 
the intruding rabble of men and books and institu- 
tions by a simple declaration of the divine fact. Bid 
the invaders take the shoes from off their feet, for God 
is here within. Let our simplicity judge them, and 
our docility to our own law demonstrate the poverty 
of nature and fortune beside our native riches. 

But now we are a mob. Man does not stand in 
awe of man, nor is his genius admonished to stay at 
home, to put itself in communication with the internal 
ocean, but it goes abroad to beg a cup of water of the 
urns of other men. We must go alone. I like the 
silent church before the service begins better than any 
preaching. How far off, how cool, how chaste the 
persons look, begirt each one with a precinct or sanc- 
tuary ! So let us always sit. Why should we as- 
sume the faults of our friend, or wife, or father, or 
child, because they sit around our hearth, or are said 
to have the same blood? All men have my blood, 
and I have all men^s. Not for that will I adopt their 
petulance or folly, even to the extent of being ashamed 
of it. But your isolation must not be mechanical, 
but spiritual ; that is, must be elevation. At times the 
whole world seems to be in conspiracy to importune 
you with emphatic trifles. Friend, client, child, sick- 
ness, fear, want, charity, all knock at once at thy closet 
door, and say, " Come out unto us." But keep thy 
state; come not into their confusion. The power 



56 ESSAY 11. 

men possess to annoy me, I give them by a weak cu- 
riosity. No man can come near me but through my 
act. " What we love that we have, but by desire we 
bereave ourselves of the love." 

If we cannot at once rise to the sanctities of obedi- 
ence and faith, let us at least resist our temptations ; 
let us enter into the state of war, and wake Thor and 
Woden, courage and constancy, in our Saxon breasts. 
This is to be done in our smooth times by speaking 
the truth. Check this lying hospitality and lying af- 
fection. Live no longer to the expectation of these 
deceived and deceiving people with whom we converse. 
Say to them, father, O mother, wife, O brother, 
O friend, I have lived with you after appearances 
hitherto. Henceforward I am the truth's. Be it 
known unto you that henceforward I obey no law less 
than the eternal law. I will have no covenants but 
proximities. I shall endeavor to nourish my parents, 
to support my family, to be the chaste husband of one 
wife, — but these relations I must fill after a new and 
unprecedented way. I appeal from your customs. I 
must be myself. I cannot break myself any longer 
for you, or you. If you can love me for what I am, 
we shall be the happier. If you cannot, I will still 
seek to deserve that you should. I will not hide my 
tastes or aversions. I will so trust that what is deep 
is holy, that I will do strongly before the sun and 
moon whatever inly rejoices me, and the heart ap- 
points. If you are noble, I will love you ; if you are 
not, I will not hurt you and myself by hypocritical at- 
tentions. If you are true, but not in the same truth 
with me, cleave to your companions ; I will seek my 



SELF-RELIANCE, 57 

own. I do this not selfishly, but humbly and truly. 
It is alike your interest, and mine, and all men's, how- 
ever long we have dwelt in lies, to live in truth. Does 
this sound harsh to-day? You will soon love what is 
dictated by your nature as well as mine, and, if we 
follow the truth, it will bring us out safe at last. — 
But so you may give these friends pain. Yes, but I 
cannot sell my liberty and my power, to save their 
sensibility. Besides, all persons have their moments 
of reason, when they look out into the region of abso- 
lute truth ; then will they justify me, and do the same 
thing. 

The populace think that your rejection of popular 
standards is a rejection of all standard, and mere anti- 
nomianism ; and the bold sensualist will use the name 
of philosophy to gild his crimes. But the law of con- 
sciousness abides. There are two confessionals, in 
one or the other of which we must be shriven. You 
may fulfil your round of duties by clearing yourself 
in the direct ^ or in the reflex way. Consider whether 
you have satisfied your relations to father, mother, 
cousin, neighbor, town, cat, and dog; whether any 
of these can upbraid you. But I may also neglect 
this reflex standard, and absolve me to myself. I have 
my own stern claims and perfect circle. It denies the 
name of duty to many ofiices that are called duties. 
But if I can discharge its debts, it enables me to dis- 
pense with the popular code. If any one imagines 
that this law is lax, let him keep its commandment 
one day. 

And truly it demands something godlike in him 
who has cast off* the common motives of humanity, 



58 ESSAY II. 

and has ventured to trust himself for a taskmaster. 
High be his heart, faithful his will, clear his sight, 
that he may in good earnest be doctrine, society, law, 
to himself, that a simple purpose may be to him as 
strong as iron necessity is to others ! 

If any man consider the present aspects of what is 
called by distinction society , he will see the need of 
these ethics. The sinew and heart of man seem to be 
drawn out, and we are become timorous, desponding 
whimperers. We are afraid of truth, afraid of fortune, 
afraid of death, and afraid of each other. Our age 
yields no great and perfect persons. We want men 
and women who shall renovate life and our social 
state ; but we see that most natures are insolvent, can- 
not satisfy their own wants, have an ambition out of 
all proportion to their practical force, and do lean and 
beg day and night continually. Our housekeeping is 
mendicant, our arts, our occupations, our marriages, 
our religion, we have not chosen, but society has 
chosen for us. We are parlor soldiers. We shun 
the rugged battle of fate, where strength is born. 

If our young men miscarry in their first enterprises, 
they lose all heart. If the j^oung merchant fails, men 
say he is ruined. If the finest genius studies at one 
of our colleges, and is not installed in an office within 
one year afterwards in the cities or suburbs of Boston 
or New York, it seems to his friends and to himself 
that he is right in being disheartened, and in com- 
plaining the rest of his life. A sturdy lad from New 
Hampshire or Vermont, who in turn tries all the pro- 
fessions, who teams it, farms it, peddles, keeps a school, 
preaches, edits a newspaper, goes to Congress, buys a 



SELF-RELIANCE. 59 

township, and so forth, in successive years, and al- 
ways, like a cat, falls on his feet, is worth a hundred 
of these city dolls. He walks abreast with his days, 
and feels no shame in not " studjdng a profession ; " 
for he does not postpone his life, but lives already. 
He has not one chance, but a hundred chances. Let 
a Stoic open the resources of man, and tell men they 
are not leaning willows, but can and must detach 
themselves ; that with the exercise of self-trust, new 
powers shall appear ; that a man is the word made 
flesh, born to shed healing to the nations, that he 
should be ashamed of our compassion, and that the 
moment he acts for himself, tossing the laws, the 
books, idolatries, and customs out of the window, we 
pity him no more, but thank and revere him, — and 
that teacher shall restore the life of man to splendor, 
and make his name dear to all history. 

It is easy to see that a greater self-reliance must 
work a revolution in all the offices and relations of 
men ; in their religion ; in their education ; in their 
pursuits ; their modes of living ; their association ; in 
their property ; in their speculative views. 

1 . In what prayers do men allow themselves ! 
That which they call a holy office is not so much as 
brave and manly. Prayer looks abroad and asks for 
some foreign addition to come through some foreign 
virtue, and loses itself in endless mazes of natural and 
supernatural, and mediatorial and miraculous. Prayer 
that craves a particular commodity — any thing less 
than all good — is vicious. Prayer is the contempla- 
tion of the facts of life from the highest point of view. 
It is the soliloquy of a beholding and jubilant soul. 



6o JESS AY 11. 

It is the spirit of God pronouncing his works good. 
But prayer as a means to effect a private end is mean- 
ness and theft. It supposes dualism and not unity in 
nature and consciousness. As soon as the man is at 
one with God, he will not beg. He will then see 
prayer in all action. The prayer of the farmer kneel- 
ing in his field to weed it, the prayer of the rower 
kneeling with the stroke of his oar, are true prayers 
heard throughout nature, though for cheap ends. 
Caratach, in Fletcher's Bonduca, when admonished to 
inquire the mind of the god Audate, replies, — 

" His hidden meaning lies in our endeavors 5 
Our valors are our best gods." 

Another sort of false prayers are our regrets. Dis- 
content is the want of self-reliance : it is infirmity of 
will. Regret calamities, if you can thereby help the 
sufferer; if not, attend your own work, and already 
the evil begins to be repaired. Our sympathy is just 
as base. We come to them who weep foolishly, and 
sit down and cry for company, instead of imparting 
to them truth and health in rough electric shocks, put- 
ting them once more in communication with their 
own reason. The secret of fortune is joy in our 
hands. Welcome evermore to gods and men is the 
self-helping man. For him all doors are flung wide : 
him all tongues greet, all honors crown, all eyes follow 
with desire. Our love goes out to him and embraces 
him, because he did not need it. We solicitously and 
apologetically caress and celebrate him, because he 
held on his way and scorned our disapprobation. 
The gods love him because men hated him. " To the 



SELF-RELIANCE, 6i 

persevering mortal/' said Zoroaster, " the blessed Im- 
mortals are swift." 

As men's prayers are a disease of the will, so are 
their creeds a disease of the intellect. They say with 
those foolish Israelites, " Let not God speak to us lest 
v/e die. Speak thou, speak any man with us, and we 
will obey." Everywhere I am hindered of meeting 
God in my brother, because he has shut his own temple 
doors, and recites fables merely of his brother's or his 
brother's brother's God. Every new mind is a new 
classification. If it prove a mind of uncommon activity 
and power, a Locke, a Lavoisier, a Hutton, a Bentham, 
a Fourier, it imposes its classification on other men, 
and lo ! a new system. In proportion to the depth 
of the thought, and so to the number of the objects it 
touches and brings within reach of the pupil, is his 
complacency. But chiefly is this apparent in creeds 
and churches, which are also classifications of some 
powerful mind acting on the elemental thought of 
duty, and man's relation to the Highest. Such is 
Calvinism, Quakerism, Swedenborgism. The pupil 
takes the same delight in subordinating everything 
to the new terminology, as a girl who has just learned 
botany in seeing a new earth and new seasons there- 
by. It will happen for a time that the pupil will 
find his intellectual power has grown by the study of 
his master's mind. But in all unbalanced minds, the 
classification is idolized, passes for the end, and not 
for a speedily exhaustible means, so that the walls of 
the system blend to their eye in the remote horizon 
with the walls of the universe ; the luminaries of 
heaven seem to them hung on the arch their master 



62 ESSAY 11. 

built. They cannot imagine how you aliens have 
any right to see, — how you can see ; " It must be 
somehow that you stole the light from us." They do 
not yet perceive that light, unsystematic, indomitable, 
will break into any cabin, even into theirs. Let them 
chirp awhile and call it their own. If they are hon- 
est and do well, presently their neat new pinfold will 
be too strait and low, will crack, will lean, will rot 
and vanish, and the immortal light, all young and 
joyful, million-orbed, million-colored, will beam over 
the universe as on the first morning. 

2. It is for want of self-culture that the supersti- 
tion of Travelling, whose idols are Italy, England, 
Egypt, retains its fascination for all educated Ameri- 
cans. They who made England, Italy, or Greece 
venerable in the imagination did so by sticking fast 
where they were, like an axis of the earth. In manly 
hours, we feel that duty is our place. The soul is no 
traveller ; the wise man stays at home, and when his 
necessities, his duties, on any occasion call him from 
his house or into foreign lands, he is at home still, 
and shall make men sensible by the expression of 
his countenance, that he goes the missionary of wis- 
dom and virtue, and visits cities and men like a sover- 
eign, and not like an interloper or a valet. 

I have no churlish objection to the circumnaviga- 
tion of the globe, for the purposes of art, of study, 
and benevolence, so that the man is first domesti- 
cated, or does not go abroad with the hope of find 
ing somewhat greater than he knows. He who trav- 
els to be amused, or to get somewhat which he does 
not carry, travels away from himself, and grows old 



SELF-RELIANCE, 63 

even in youth among old things. In Thebes, in 
Palmyra, his will and mind have become old and 
dilapidated as they. He carries ruins to ruins. 

Travelling is a fool's paradise. Our first journeys 
discover to us the indifference of places. At home I 
dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated 
with beauty, and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, 
embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last 
wake up in Naples ; and there beside me is the stern 
fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled 
from. I seek the Vatican and the palaces. I affect 
to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I 
am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever 
I go. 

3. But the rage of travelling is a symptom of a 
deeper unsoundness affecting the whole intellectual 
action. The intellect is vagabond, and our system 
of education fosters restlessness. Our minds travel 
when our bodies are forced to stay at home. We 
imitate ; and what is imitation but the travelling of 
the mind 1 Our houses are built with foreign taste ; 
our shelves are garnished with foreign ornaments ; 
our opinions, our tastes, our faculties, lean and follow 
the Past and the Distant. The soul created the arts 
wherever they have flourished. It was in his own 
mind that the artist sought his model. It was an 
application of his own thought to the thing to be done 
and the conditions to be observed. And why need we 
copy the Doric or the Gothic model? Beauty, con- 
venience, grandeur of thought, and quaint expression 
are as near to us as to ^ny ; and if the American artist 
will study with hope and love the precise thing to 



64 ESSAY IT, 

be done by him, considering the climate, the soil, the 
length of the day, the wants of the people, the habit 
and form of the government, he will create a house in 
which all these will find themselves fitted, and taste 
and sentiment will be satisfied also. 

Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift 
you can present every moment with the cumulative 
force of a whole lifers cultivation ; but of the adopted 
talent of another, you have only an extemporaneous, 
half possession. That which each can do best, none 
but his Maker can teach him. No man yet knows 
what it is, nor can, till that person has exhibited 
it. Where is the master who could have taught 
Shakespeare ? Where is the master who could have 
instructed Franklin, or Washington, or Bacon, or 
Newton ? Every great man is a unique. The Scip- 
ionism of Scipio is precisely that part he could not 
borrow. Shakespeare will never be made by the study 
of Shakespeare. Do that which is assigned you, and 
you cannot hope too much or dare too much. There 
is at this moment for you an utterance brave and 
grand as that of the colossal chisel of Phidias, or 
trowel of the Egyptians, or the pen of Moses, or 
Dante, but different from all these. Not possibly 
will the soul all rich, all eloquent, with thousand- 
cloven tongue, deign to repeat itself; but if you can, 
hear what these patriarchs say, surely you can reply 
to them in the same pitch of voice ; for the ear and 
the tongue are two organs of one nature. Abide in 
the simple and noble regions of thy life, obey thy 
heart, and thou shalt reproduce the Eoreworld again. 

4. As our Religion, our Education, our Art look 



SELF-RELIANCE, 65 

abroad, so does our spirit of society. All men plume 
themselves on the improvement of society, and no 
man improves. 

Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one 
side as it gains on the other. It undergoes continual 
changes ; it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is Chris- 
tianized, it is rich, it is scientific; but this change 
is not amelioration. For every thing that is given, 
something is taken. Society acquires new arts, and 
loses old instincts. What a contrast between the 
well-clad, reading, writing, thinking American, with 
a watch, a pencil, and a bill of exchange in his 
pocket, and the naked New Zealander, whose prop- 
erty is a club, a spear, a mat, and an undivided 
twentieth of a shed to sleep under ! But compare 
the health of the two men, and you shall see that 
the white man has lost his aboriginal strength. If 
the traveller tell us truly, strike the savage with a 
broad axe, and in a day or two the flesh shall unite 
and heal as if you struck the blow into soft pitch, and 
the same blow shall send the white to his grave. 

The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost 
the use of his feet. He is supported on crutches, but 
lacks so much support of muscle. He has a fine 
Geneva watch, but he fails of the skill to tell the hour 
by the sun. A Greenwich nautical almanac he has, 
and so being sure of the information when he wants 
it, the man in the street does not know a star in the 
sky. The solstice he does not observe ; the equinox 
he knows as little ; and the whole bright calendar of 
the year is without a dial in his mind. His note- 
books impair his memory ; his libraries overload his 
5 



66 USSAY IL 

wit ; the insurance-office increases the number of ac; 
cidents ; and it may be a question whether machinery 
does not encumber; whether we have not lost bj 
refinement some energy, by a Christianity intrenchec 
in establishments and forms, some vigor of wild vir' 
tue. For every Stoic was a Stoic ; But in Christen 
dom where is the Christian ? 

There is no more deviation in the moral standarc 
than in the standard of height or bulk. No greate: 
men are now than ever were. A singular equality 
may be observed between the great men of the firs 
and of the last ages ; nor can all the science, art, re 
ligion, and philosophy of the nineteenth century avai 
to educate greater men than Plutarch^s heroes, thret 
or four and twenty centuries ago. Not in time h 
the race progressive. Phocion, Socrates, Anaxago 
ras, Diogenes, are great men, but they leave no class 
He who is really of their class will not be called b} 
their name, but will be his own man, and, in his turn 
the founder of a sect. The arts and inventions of 
each period are only its costume, and do not invigo 
rate men. The harm of the improved machinery maj 
compensate its good. Hudson and Behring accom 
plished so much in their fishing-boats as to astonisl 
Parry and Franklin, whose equipment exhausted th( 
resources of science and art. Galileo, with an opera 
glass, discovered a more splendid series of celestia 
phenomena than any one since. Columbus founc 
the New World in an undecked boat. It is curio ue 
to see the periodical disuse and perishing of means 
and machinery, which were introduced with loud 
laudation a few years or centuries before. The greal 



Self-reliance, 67 

genius returns to essential man. We reckoned the 
improvements of the art of war among the triumphs 
of science; and yet Napoleon conquered Europe by 
the bivouac, which consisted of falling back on naked 
valor, and disencumbering it of all aids. The Em- 
peror held it impossible to make a perfect army, says 
Las Casas, " without abolishing our arms, magazines, 
commissaries, and carriages, until, in imitation of 
the Roman custom, the soldier should receive his 
supply of corn, grind it in his hand-mill, and bake 
his bread himself. " 

Society is a wave. The wave moves onward, but 
the water of which it is composed does not. The 
same particle does not rise from the valley to the 
ridge. Its unity is only phenomenal. The persons 
who make up a nation to-day, next year die, and 
their experience with them. 

And so the reliance on Property, including the reli- 
ance on governments which protect it, is the want of 
self-reliance. Men have looked away from themselves 
and at things so long, that they have come to esteem 
the religious, learned, and civil institutions as guards 
of property ; and they deprecate assaults on these, be- 
cause they feel them to be assaults on property. They 
measure their esteem of each other by what each has, 
and not by what each is. But a cultivated man be-, 
comes ashamed of his property, out of new respect for 
jhis nature. Especially he hates what he has, if he see 
[that it is accidental, — came to him by inheritance, or 
gift, or crime ; then he feels that it is not having ; it 
does not belong to him, nas no root in him, and 
merely lies there, because no revolution or no robber 



68 ESSAY II, 

takes it away. But that which a man is does always 
by necessity acquire ; and what the man acquires is 
living property, which does not wait the beck of rulers, 
or mobs, or revolutions, or fire, or storm, or bankrupt- 
cies, but perpetually renews itself wherever the man 
breathes. " Thy lot or portion of life," said the 
Caliph Ali, " is seeking after thee ; therefore be at rest 
from seeking after it." Our dependence on these for- 
eign goods leads us to our slavish respect for numbers. 
The political parties meet in numerous conventions ; 
the greater the concourse, and with each new uproar 
of announcement, The delegation from Essex ! The 
Democrats from New Hampshire ! The Whigs of 
Maine ! the young patriot feels himself stronger than 
before by a new thousand of eyes and arms. In like 
manner the reformers summon conventions, and vote 
and resolve in multitude. Not so, O friends ! will 
the God deign to enter and inhabit you, but by a 
method precisely the reverse. It is only as a man 
puts off all foreign support, and stands alone, that I 
see him to be strong and to prevail. He is weaker 
by every recruit to his banner. Is not a man better 
than a town ? Ask nothing of men, and in the end- 
less mutation, thou only firm column must presently 
appear the upholder of all that surrounds thee. He 
who knows that power is inborn, that he is weak be- 
cause he has looked for good out of him and else- 
where, and so perceiving, throws himself unhesitat- 
ingly on his thought, instantly rights himself, stands 
in the erect position, commands his limbs, works 
miracles; just as a man who stands on his feet is 
stronger than a man who stands on his head. 



SELF-RELIANCE. 69 

So use all that is called Fortune. Most men gam- 
ble with her, and gain all, and lose all, as her wheel 
rolls. But do thou leave as unlawful these winnings, 
and deal with Cause and Effect, the chancellors of 
God. In the Will work and acquire, and thou hast 
chained the wheel of Chance, and shalt sit hereafter 
out of fear from her rotations. A political victory, a 
rise of rents, the recovery of your sick, or the return 
of your absent friend, or some other favorable event, 
raises your spirits, and you think good days are pre- 
paring for you. Do not believe it. Nothing can 
bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you 
peace but the triumph of principles. 



COMPENSATION. 



The wings of Time are black and white, 
Pied with morning and with night. 
Mountain tall and ocean deep 
Trembling balance duly keep. 
In changing moon, in tidal wave, 
Glows the feud of Want and Have. 
Gauge of more and less through space 
Electric star and pencil plays. 
The lonely Earth amid the balls 
That hurry through the eternal halls, 
A makeweight flying to the void. 
Supplemental asteroid, 
Or compensatory spark. 
Shoots across the neutral Dark. 



Man's the elm, and Wealth the vine, 
Stanch and strong the tendrils twine: 
Though the frail ringlets thee deceive. 
None from its stock that vine can reave. 
Fear not, then, thou child infirm, 
There 's no god dare wrong a worm. 
Laurel crowns cleave to deserts, 
And power to him who power exerts 5 
Hast not thy share ? On winged feet, 
Lo! it rushes thee to meet 5 
And all that Nature made thy own, 
Floating in air or pent in stone. 
Will rive the hills and swim the sea, 
And, like thy shadow, follow thee. 



ESSAY III. 



COMPENSATION. 




IVER since I was a boy, I have wished to 
write a discourse on Compensation ; for it 
seemed to me, when very young, that on 
this subject life was ahead of theology, and 
the people knew more than the preachers taught. The 
documents, too, from which the doctrine is to be drawn, 
charmed my fancy by their endless variety, and lay 
always before me, even in sleep ; for they are the tools 
in our hands, the bread in our basket, the transactions 
of the street, the farm, and the dwelling-house, greet- 
ings, relations, debts and credits, the influence of char- 
acter, the nature and endowment of all men. It 
seemed to me, also, that in it might be shown men a 
ray of divinity, the present action of the soul of this 
world, clean from all vestige of tradition ; and so the 
heart of man might be bathed by an inundation of 
eternal love, conversing with that which he knows was 
always and always must be, because it really is now. 
It appeared, moreover, that if this doctrine could be 
stated in terms with any resemblance to those bright 
intuitions in which this truth is sometimes revealed to 
us, it would be a star in many dark hours and crooked 



74 ESSAY III. 

passages in our journey that would not suffer us to 
lose our way. 

I was lately confirmed in these desires by hearing 
a sermon at church. The preacher, a man esteemed 
for his orthodoxy, unfolded in the ordinary manner the 
doctrine of the Last Judgment. He assumed, that 
judgment is not executed in this world ; that the 
wicked are successful ; that the good are miserable ; 
and then urged from reason and from Scripture a 
compensation to be made to both parties in the next 
life. No offence appeared to be taken by the congre- 
gation at this doctrine. As far as I could observe, 
when the meeting broke up, they separated without 
remark on the sermon. 

Yet what was the import of this teaching ? What 
did the preacher mean by saying that the good are 
miserable in the present life ? Was it that houses 
and lands, offices, wine, horses, dress, luxury, are had 
by unprincipled men, whilst the saints are poor and 
despised ; and that a compensation is to be made to 
these last hereafter, by giving them the like gratifica- 
tions another day, — bank-stock and doubloons, veni- 
son and champagne '? This must be the compensa- 
tion intended ; for what else ? Is it that they are to 
have leave to pray and praise ? to love and serve 
men ? Why, that they can do now. The legitimate 
inference the disciple would draw was, "We are to 
have such a good time as the sinners have now '^ ; 
or, to push it to its extreme import, " You sin now; 
we shall sin by and by ; we would sin now, if we 
could ; not being successful, we expect our revenge 
to-morrow." 



COMPENSATION, 75 

The fallacy lay in the immense concession, that the 
bad are successful ; that justice is not done now. 
The blindness of the preacher consisted in deferring 
to the base estimate of the market of what constitutes 
a manly success, instead of confronting and convict- 
ing the world from the truth ; announcing the pres- 
ence of the soul, the omnipotence of the will : and so 
establishing the standard of good and ill, of success 
and falsehood. 

I find a similar base tone in the popular religious 
works of the day, and the same doctrines assumed by 
the literary men when occasionally they treat the re- 
lated topics. I think that our popular theology has 
gained in decorum, and not in principle, over the 
superstitions it has displaced. But men are better 
than this theology. Their daily life gives it the lie. 
Every ingenuous and aspiring soul leaves the doctrine 
behind him in his own experience ; and all men feel 
sometimes the falsehood which they cannot demon- 
strate. For men are wiser than they know. That 
which they hear in schools and pulpits without after- 
thought, if said in conversation, would probably be 
questioned in silence. If a man dogmatize in a 
mixed company on Providence and the divine laws, 
he is answered by a silence which conveys well 
enough to an observer the dissatisfaction of the hearer, 
but his incapacity to make his own statement. 

I shall attempt in this and the following chapter to 
record some facts that indicate the path of the law of 
Compensation ; happy beyond my expectation, if I 
shall truly draw the smallest arc of this circle. 



76 JESS AY III. 

Polarity, or action and reaction, we meet in every 
part of nature ; in darkness and light ; in heat and 
cold ; in the ebb and flow of waters ; in male and 
female ; in the inspiration and expiration of plants 
and animals ; in the equation of quantity and quality 
in the fluids of the animal body ; in the systole and 
diastole of the heart ; in the undulations of fluids, and 
of sound ; in the centrifugal and centripetal gravity ; 
in electricity, galvanism, and chemical affinity. Su- 
perinduce magnetism at one end of a needle ; the op- 
posite magnetism takes place at the other end. If the 
south attracts, the north repels. To empty here, you 
must condense there. An inevitable dualism bisects 
nature, so that each thing is a half, and suggests an- 
other thing to make it whole ; as, spirit, matter ; man, 
woman ; odd, even ; subjective, objective ; in, out ; 
upper, under ; motion, rest ; yea, nay. 

Whilst the world is thus dual, so is every one of its 
parts. The entire system of things gets represented 
in every particle. There is somewhat that resembles 
the ebb and flow of the sea, day and night, man and 
woman, in a single needle of the pine, in a kernel of 
corn, in each individual of every animal tribe. The 
reaction, so grand in the elements, is repeated within 
these small boundaries. For example, in the animal 
kingdom the physiologist has observed that no crea- 
tures are favorites, but a certain compensation bal- 
ances every gift and every defect. A surplusage 
given to one part is paid out of a reduction from an- 
other part of the same creature. If the head and 
neck are enlarged, the trunk and extremities are cut 
short. 



COMPENSATION. 



77 



The theory of the mechanic forces is another ex- 
ample. What we gain in power is lost in time ; and 
the converse. The periodic or compensating errors 
of the planets is another instance. The influences of 
climate and soil in political history are another. The 
cold climate invigorates. The barren soil does not 
breed fevers, crocodiles, tigers, or scorpions. 

The same dualism underlies the nature^ and condi- 
tion of man. Every excess causes a defect; every 
defect, an excess. Every sweet hath its sour ; every 
evil, its good. Every faculty which is a receiver of 
pleasure has an equal penalty put on its abuse. It 
is to answer for its moderation with its life. For 
every grain of wit there is a grain of folly. For 
every thing you have missed, you have gained some- 
thing else; and for every thing you gain, you lose 
something. If riches increase, they are increased that 
use them. If the gatherer gathers too much, nature 
takes out of the man what she puts into his chest ; 
swells the estate, but kills the owner. Nature hates 
monopolies and exceptions. The waves of the sea do 
not more speedily seek a level from their loftiest 
tossing, than the varieties of condition tend to equal- 
ize themselves. There is always some levelling cir- 
cumstance that puts down the overbearing, the strong, 
the rich, the fortunate, substantially on the same 
ground with all others. Is a man too strong and 
fierce for society, and by temper and position a bad 
citizen, — a morose ruffian, with a dash of the pirate 
in him, — nature sends him a troop of pretty sons 
and daughters, who are getting along in the dame^s 
classes at the village school, and love and fear for 



78 ESSAY IIL 

them smooths his grim scowl to courtesy. Thus she 
contrives to intenerate the granite and felspar, takes 
the boar out, and puts the lamb in, and keeps her 
balance true. 

The farmer imagines power and place are fine 
things. But the President has paid dear for his 
White House. It has commonly cost him all his 
peace, and the best of his manly attributes. To pre- 
serve for a short time so conspicuous an appearance 
before the world, he is content to eat dust before the 
real masters who stand erect behind the throne. Or, 
do men desire the more substantial and permanent 
grandeur of genius ? Neither has this an immunity. 
He who by force of will or of thought is great, and 
overlooks thousands, has the charges of that emi- 
nence. With every influx of light comes new danger. 
Has he light 1 he must bear witness to the light, and 
always outrun that sympathy which gives him such 
keen satisfaction, by his fidelity to new revelations of 
the incessant soul. He must hate father and mother, 
wife and child. Has he all that the world loves and 
admires and covets ? — he must cast behind him their 
admiration, and afilict them by faithfulness to his 
truth, and become a byword and a hissing. 

This law writes the laws of cities and nations. It 
is in vain to build or plot or combine against it. 
Things refuse to be mismanaged long. Res nolunt diu 
male administrari. Though no checks to a new evil 
appear, the checks exist, and will appear. If the gov- 
ernment is cruel, the governor's life is not safe. If 
you tax too high, the revenue will yield nothing. If 
you make the criminal code sanguinary, juries will not 



tJOMPENSATION. 79 

convict. If the law is too mild, private vengeance 
comes in. If the government is a terrific democracy, 
the pressure is resisted by an overcharge of energy in 
the citizen, and life glows with a fiercer flame. The 
true life and satisfactions of man seem to elude the ut- 
most rigors or felicities of condition, and to establish 
themselves with great indifFerency under all varieties 
of circumstances. Under all governments the influ- 
ence of character remains the same, — in Turkey and 
in New England about alike. Under the primeval 
despots of Egypt, history honestly confesses that 
man must have been as free as culture could make 
him. 

These appearances indicate the fact that the uni- 
verse is represented in every one of its particles. 
Everything in nature contains all the powers of na- 
ture. Everything is made of one hidden stufl"; as 
the naturalist sees one type under every metamorpho- 
sis, and regards a horse as a running man, a fish as a 
swimming man, a bird as a flying man, a tree as a 
rooted man. Each new form repeats not only the 
main character of the type, but part for part all the 
details, all the aims, furtherances, hindrances, ener- 
gies, and whole system of every other. Every occu- 
pation, trade, art, transaction, is a compend of the 
world, and a correlative of every other. Each one is 
an entire emblem of human life ; of its good and ill, 
its trials, its enemies, its course, and its end. And 
each one must somehow accommodate the whole man, 
and recite all his destiny. 

The world globes itself in a drop of dew. The mi- 
croscope cannot find the animalcule which is less per- 



8o ESSAY IIL 

feet for being little. Eyes, ears, taste, smell, motion, 
resistance, appetite, and organs of reproduction that 
take hold on eternity, — all find room to consist in 
the small creature. So do we put our life into every 
act. The true doctrine of omnipresence is, that God 
reappears with all his parts in every moss and cob- 
web. The value of the universe contrives to throw 
itself into every point. If the good is there, so is the 
evil ; if the affinity, so the repulsion ; if the force, so 
the limitation. 

Thus is the universe alive. All things are moral. 
That soul, which within us is a sentiment, outside of 
us is a law. We feel its inspiration ; out there in his- 
tory we can see its fatal strength. " It is in the world, 
and the world was made by it." Justice is not post- 
poned. A perfect equity adjusts its balance in all 
parts of life. Ot kv^oi Alos del ei^TriVrouort, — The 
dice of God are always loaded. The world looks like 
a multiplication-table, or a mathematical equation, 
which, turn it how you will, balances itself Take 
what figure you will, its exact value, nor more nor 
less, still returns to you. Every secret is told, every 
crime is punished, every virtue rewarded, every wrong 
redressed, in silence and certainty. What we call 
retribution is the universal necessity by which the 
whole appears wherever a part appears. If you see 
smoke, there must be fire. If you see a hand or a 
limb, you know that the trunk to which it belongs is 
there behind. 

Every act rewards itself, or, in other words, inte- 
grates itself, in a twofold manner ; first, in the thing, 
or in real nature ; and secondly, in the circumstance, 



COMPENSATION. 8i 

or in apparent nature. Men call the circumstance the 
retribution. The causal retribution is in the thing, 
and is seen by the soul. The retribution in the cir- 
cumstance is seen by the understanding ; it is insepa- 
rable from the thing, but is often spread over a long 
time, and so does not become distinct until after many 
years. The specific stripes may follow late after the 
offence, but they follow because they accompany it. 
Crime and punishment grow out of one stem. Pun- 
ishment is a fruit that unsuspected ripens within the 
flower of the pleasure which concealed it. Cause and 
effect, means and ends, seed and fruit, cannot be sev- 
ered ; for the effect already blooms in the cause, the 
end pre-exists in the means, the fruit in the seed. 

Whilst thus the world will be whole, and refuses to 
be disparted, we seek to act partially, to sunder, to 
appropriate ; for example, to gratify the senses, we 
sever the pleasure of the senses from the needs of the 
character. The ingenuity of man has always been 
dedicated to the solution of one problem, how to 
detach the sensual sweet, the sensual strong, the sen- 
sual bright, (Sbc, from the moral sweet, the moral deep, 
the moral fair; that is, again, to contrive to cut clean 
off this upper surface so thin as to leave it bottomless ; 
to get a one end, without an other end. The soul says, 
Eat ; the body would feast. The soul says, The man 
and woman shall be one flesh and one soul ; the body 
would join the flesh only. The soul says. Have do- 
minion over all things to the ends of virtue ; the body 
would have the power over things to its own ends. 

The soul strives amain to live and work through 
all things. It would be the only fact. All things 
6 



82 ESSAY III. 

shall be added unto it, — power, pleasure, knowl- 
edge, beauty. The particular man aims to be some- 
body; to set up for himself; to truck and higgle 
for a private good ; and, in particulars, to ride, that 
he may ride ; to dress, that he may be dressed ; to 
eat, that he may eat ; and to govern, that he may be 
seen. Men seek to be great ; they would have offices, 
wealth, power, and fame. They think that to be 
great is to possess one side of nature, — the sweet, 
without the other side, — the bitter. 

This dividing and detaching is steadily counter- 
acted. Up to this day, it must be owned, no projec- 
tor has had the smallest success. The parted water 
reunites behind our hand. Pleasure is taken out of 
pleasant things, profit out of profitable things, power 
out of strong things, as soon as we seek to separate 
them from the whole. We can no more halve things 
and get the sensual good by itself, than we can get 
an inside that shall have no outside, or a light with- 
out a shadow. *' Drive out nature with a fork, she 
comes running back.'' 

Life invests itself with inevitable conditions, which 
the unwise seek to dodge, which one and another 
brags that he does not know ; that they do not touch 
him : but the brag is on his lips, the conditions are 
in his soul. If he escapes them in one part, they 
attack him in another more vital part. If he has 
escaped them in form, and in the appearance, it is 
because he has resisted his life, and fled from himself, 
and the retribution is so much death. So signal is 
the failure of all attempts to make this separation of 
the good from the tax, that the experiment would not 



COMPENSATION, 83 

be tried, — since to try it is to be mad, — but for the 
circumstance, that when the disease began in the will, 
of rebellion and separation, the intellect is at once in- 
fected, so that the man ceases to see God whole in 
each object, but is able to see the sensual allurement 
of an object, and not see the sensual hurt; he sees 
the mermaid's head, but not the dragon's tail ; and 
thinks he can cut off that which he would have, 
from that which he would not have. " How secret 
art thou who dwellest in the highest heavens in 
silence, thou only great God, sprinkling with an 
unwearied Providence certain penal blindnesses upon 
such as have unbridled desires ! " * 

The human soul is true to these facts in the paint- 
ing of fable, of history, of law, of proverbs, of conver- 
sation. It finds a tongue in literature unawares. 
Thus the Greeks called Jupiter, Supreme Mind ; but 
having traditionally ascribed to him many base ac- 
tions, they involuntarily made amends to reason, by 
tying up the hands of so bad a god. He is made as 
helpless as a king of England. Prometheus knows 
one secret which Jove, must bargain for ; Minerva, 
another. He cannot get his own thunders ; Minerva 
keeps the key of them. 

" Of all the gods, I only know tUe keys 
That ope the solid doors within whose vaults 
His thunders sleep." 

A plain confession of the in-working of the All, 
and of its moral aim. The Indian mythology ends 
in the same ethics ; and it would seem impossible for 

* St. Augustine, Confessions, B. I. 



84 ESSAY IIL 

any fable to be invented and get any currency which 
was not moral. Aurora forgot to ask youth for her 
lover, and though Tithonus is immortal, he is old. 
Achilles is not quite invulnerable ; the sacred waters 
did not wash the heel by which Thetis held him. 
Siegfried, in the Nibelungen is not quite immortal ; 
for a leaf fell on his back whilst he was bathing in the 
dragon's blood, and that spot which it covered is mor- 
tal. And so it must be. There is a crack in every 
thing God has made. It would seem, there is always 
this vindictive circumstance, stealing in at unawares, 
even into the wild poesy in which the human fancy 
attempted to make bold holiday, and to shake itself 
free of the old laws, — this back-stroke, this kick 
of the gun, certifying that the law is fatal ; that in 
nature nothing can be given, all things are sold. 

This is that ancient doctrine of Nemesis, who keeps 
watch in the universe, and lets no offence go unchas- 
tised. The Furies, they said, are attendants on jus- 
tice ; and if the sun in heaven should transgress his 
path, they would punish him. The poets related that 
stone walls, and iron swords, and leathern thongs 
had an occult sympathy with the wrongs of their 
owners ; that the belt which Ajax gave Hector 
dragged the Trojan hero over the field at the wheels 
of the car of Achilles, and the sword which Hector 
gave Ajax was that on whose point Ajax fell. They 
recorded, that when the Thasians erected a statue to 
Theagenes, a victor in the games, one of his rivals 
went to it by night, and endeavored to throw it down 
by repeated blows, until at last he moved it from its 
pedestal, and was crushed to death beneath its fall. 



COMPENSATION. 85 

This voice of fable has in it somewhat divine. It 
came from thought above the will of the writer. That 
is the best part of each writer which has nothing pri- 
vate in it ; that which he does not know, that which 
flowed out of his constitution, and not from his too 
active invention ; that which in the study of a single 
artist you might not easily find, but in the study of 
many, you would abstract as the spirit of them all. 
Phidias it is not, but the work of man in that early 
Hellenic world, that I would know. ^ The name and 
circumstance of Phidias, however convenient for his- 
tory, embarrass when we come to the highest criticism. 
We are to see that which man was tending to do in a 
given period, and was hindered, or, if you will, modi- 
fied in doing, by the interfering volitions of Phidias, 
of Dante, of Shakespeare, the organ whereby man at 
the moment wrought. 

Still more striking is the expression of this fact in 
the proverbs of all nations, which are always the liter- 
ature of reason, or the statements of an absolute truth, 
without qualification. Proverbs, like the sacred books 
of each nation, are the sanctuary of the intuitions. 
That which the droning world, chained to appearances, 
will not allow the realist to say in his own words, it 
will suffer him to say in proverbs without contradic- 
lion. And this law of laws which the pulpit, the sen- 
ate, and the college deny, is hourly preached in all 
markets and workshops by flights of proverbs, whose 
teaching is as true and as omnipresent as that of birds 
and flies. 

All things are double, one against another. — Tit 
for tat ; an eye for an eye ; a tooth for a tooth ; blood 



86 JESS AY III. 

for blood ; measure for measure ; love for love. — 
Give, and it shall be given you. — He that watereth 
shall be watered himself. — What will you have ? 
quoth God ; pay for it, and take it. — Nothing venture, 
nothing have. — Thou shalt be paid exactly for what 
thou hast done, no more, no less. — Who doth not 
work shall not eat. — Harm watch, harm catch. — 
Curses always recoil on the head of him who impre- 
cates them. — If you put a chain around the neck of a 
slave, the other end fastens itself around your own. — 
Bad counsel confounds the adviser. — The Devil is an 
ass. 

It is thus written, because it is thus in life. Our 
action is overmastered and characterized above our 
will by the law of nature. We aim at a petty end 
quite aside from the public good, but our act arranges 
itself by irresistible magnetism in a line with the poles 
of the world. 

A man cannot speak but he judges himself. With 
his will, or against his will, he draws his portrait to 
the eye of his companions by every word. Every 
opinion reacts on him who utters it. It is a thread- 
ball thrown at a mark, but the other end remains in 
the thrower's bag. Or, rather, it is a harpoon hurled 
at the whale, unwinding, as it flies, a coil of cord in the 
boat, and if the harpoon is not good, or not well 
thrown, it will go nigh to cut the steersman in twain, 
or to sink the boat. 

You cannot do wrong without suffering wrong. 
" No man had ever a point of pride that was not in- 
jurious to him," said Burke. The exclusive in fash- 
ionable life does not see that he excludes himself from 



COMPENSATION. 87 

enjoyment, in the attempt to appropriate it. The ex- 
clusionist in rehgion does not see that he shuts the 
door of heaven on himself, in striving to shut out oth- 
ers. Treat men as pawns and ninepins, and you 
shall suffer as v^ell as they. If you leave out their 
heart, you shall lose your own. The senses would 
make things of all persons ; of women, of children, of 
the poor. The vulgar proverb, " I will get it from 
his purse or get it from his skin," is sound philosophy. 
All infractions of love and equity in our social relations 
are speedily punished. They are punished by fear. 
Whilst I stand in simple relations to my fellow-man, 
I have no displeasure in meeting him. We meet as 
water meets water, or as two currents of air mix, with 
perfect diffusion and interpcnetration of nature. But 
as soon as there is any departure from simplicity, and 
attempt at halfness, or good for me that is not good 
for him, my neighbor feels the wrong ; he shrinks 
from me a^ far as I have shrunk from him; his eyes 
no longer seek mine ; there is war between us ; there 
is hate in him and fear in me. 

All the old abuses in society, universal and particu- 
lar, all unjust accumulations of property and pow- 
er, are avenged in the same manner. Fear is an in- 
structor of great sagacity, and the herald of all revo- 
lutions. One thing he teaches, that there is rottenness 
where he appears. He is a carrion crow, and though 
you see not well what he hovers for, there is death 
somewhere. Our property is timid, our laws are 
timid, our cultivated classes are timid. Fear for ages 
has boded and mowed and gibbered over government 
and property. That obscene bird is not there for 



88 ESSAY III. 

nothing. He indicates great wrongs which must be 
revised. 

Of the like nature is that expectation of change 
which instantly follows the suspension of our volunta- 
ry activity. The terror of cloudless noon, the eme- 
rald of Polycrates, the awe of prosperity, the instinct 
which leads every generous soul to impose on itself 
tasks of a noble asceticism and vicarious virtue, are 
the tremblings of the balance of justice through the 
heart and mind of man. 

Experienced men of the world know very well that 
it is best to pay scot and lot as they go along, and 
that a man often pays dear for a small frugality. 
The borrower runs in his own debt. Has a man 
gained any thing who has received a hundred favors 
and rendered none? Has he gained by borrowing, 
through indolence or cunning, his neighbor's wares, 
or horses, or money ? There arises on the deed the 
instant acknowledgment of benefit on the one part, 
and of debt on the other ; that is, of superiority and 
inferiority. The transaction remains in the memory 
of himself and his neighbor ; and every new transac- 
tion alters, according to its nature, their relation to 
each other. He may soon come to see that he had 
better have broken his own bones than to have ridden 
in his neighbor's coach, and that " the highest price 
he can pay for a thing is to ask for it." 

A wise man will extend this lesson to all parts of 
life, and know that it is the part of prudence to face 
every claimant, and pay every just demand on your 
time, your talents, or your heart. Always pay ; for, 
first or last, you must pay your entire debt. Persons 



COMPENSA TION. 8 9 

and events may stand for a time between you and 
justice, but it is only a postponement. You must 
pay at last your own debt. If you are wise, you will 
dread a prosperity which only loads you with more. 
Benefit is the end of nature. But for every benefit 
which you receive, a tax is levied. He is great who 
confers the most benefits. He is base — and that is 
the one base thing in the universe — to receive favors 
and render none. In the order of nature we cannot 
render benefits to those from whom we receive them, 
or only seldom. But the benefit we receive must be 
rendered again, line for line, deed for deed, cent for 
cent, to somebody. Beware of too much good stay- 
ing in your hand. It will fast corrupt and worm 
worms. Pay it away quickly in some sort. 

Labor is watched over by the same pitiless laws. 
Cheapest, say the prudent, is the dearest labor. What 
we buy in a broom, a mat, a wagon, a knife, is some 
application of good sense to a common want. It is 
best to pay in your land a skilful gardener, or to buy 
good sense applied to gardening ; in your sailor, good 
sense applied to navigation ; in the house, good sense 
applied to cooking, sewing, serving ; in your agent, 
good sense applied to accounts and affairs. So do 
you multiply your presence, or spread yourself through- 
out your estate. But because of the dual constitution 
of things, in labor as in life, there can be no cheating. 
The thief steals from himself. The swindler swindles 
himself. For the real price of labor is knowledge 
and virtue, whereof wealth and credit are signs. 
These signs, like paper money, may be counterfeited 
or stolen, but that which they represent, namely. 



90 



ESSAY in. 



knowledge and virtue, cannot be counterfeited or 
stolen. These ends of labor cannot be answered but 
by real exertions of the mind, and in obedience to 
pure motives. The cheat, the defaulter, the gambler, 
cannot extort the knowledge of material and moral 
nature which his honest care and pains yield to the 
operative. The law of nature is, Do the thing, and 
you shall have the power ; but they who do not the 
thing have not the power. 

Human labor, through all its forms, from the sharp- 
ening of a stake to the construction of a city or an 
epic, is one immense illustration of the perfect com- 
pensation of the universe. The absolute balance of 
Give and Take, the doctrine that everything has its 
price, — and if that price is not paid, not that thing 
but something else is obtained, and that it is impossi- 
ble to get anything without its price, — is not less 
sublime in the columns of a ledger than in the budgets 
of states, in the laws of light and- darkness, in all the 
action and reaction of nature. I cannot doubt that 
the high laws which each man sees implicated in those 
processes with which he is conversant, the stern ethics 
which sparkle on his chisel-edge, which are measured 
out by his plumb and foot-rule, which stand as mani- 
fest in the footing of the shop-bill as in the history of 
a state, — do recommend to him his trade, and though 
seldom named, exalt his business to his imagination. 

The league between virtue and nature engages all 
things to assume a hostile front to vice. The beauti- 
ful laws and substances of the world persecute and 
whip the traitor. He finds that things are arranged 
for truth and benefit, but there is no den in the wide 



CO MP ENS A TION, 9 1 

world to hide a rogue. Commit a crime, and the 
earth is made of glass. Commit a crime, and it seems 
as if a coat of snow fell on the ground, such as reveals 
in the woods the track of every partridge and fox and 
squirrel and mole. You cannot recall the spoken 
word, you cannot wipe out the foot-track, you cannot 
draw up the ladder, so as to leave no inlet or clew. 
Some damning circumstance always transpires. The 
laws and substances of nature — water, snoWj wind, 
gravitation — become penalties to the thief. 

On the other hand, the law holds with equal sure- 
ness for all right action. Love, and you shall be 
loved. All love is mathematically just, as much as 
the two sides of an algebraic equation. The good 
man has absolute good, which like fire turns every- 
thing to its own nature, so that you cannot do him 
any harm ; but as the royal armies sent against Na- 
poleon, when he approached, cast down their colors 
and from enemies became friends, so disasters of all 
kinds, as sickness, offence, poverty, prove benefac- 
tors : — 

" Winds blow and waters roll 
Strength to the brave, and power and deity, 
Yet in themselves are nothing." 

The good are befriended even by weakness and 
defect. As no man had ever a point of pride that 
was not injurious to him, so no man had ever a defect 
that was not somewhere made useful to him. The 
stag in the fable admired his horns and blamed his 
feet, but when the hunter came, his feet saved him, 
and afterwards, caught in the thicket, his horns de- 
stroyed him. Every man in his lifetime needs to 



92 ESSAY III. 

thank his faults. As no man thoroughly understands 
a truth until he has contended against it, so no man 
has a thorough acquaintance with the hindrances or 
talents of men, until he has suffered from the one, 
and seen the triumph of the other over his own want 
of the same. Has he a defect of temper that unfits 
him to live in society ? Thereby he is driven to en- 
tertain himself alone, and acquire habits of self-help ; 
and thus, like the wounded oyster, he mends his shell 
with pearl. 

Our strength grows out of our weakness. The in- 
dignation which arms itself with secret forces does not 
awaken until we are pricked and stung and sorely as- 
sailed. A great man is always willing to be little. 
Whilst he sits on the cushion of advantages, he goes 
to sleep. When he is pushed, tormented, defeated, 
he has a chance to learn something ; he has been put 
on his wits, on his manhood ; he has gained facts ; 
learns his ignorance ; is cured of the insanity of con- 
ceit ; has got moderation and real skill. The wise 
man throws himself on the side of his assailants. It 
is more his interest than it is theirs to find his weak 
point. The wound cicatrizes and falls off from him 
like a dead skin, and when they would triumph, lo ! 
he has passed on invulnerable. Blame is safer than 
praise. I hate to be defended in a newspaper. As 
long as all that is said is said against me, I feel a cer- 
tain assurance of success. But as soon as honeyed 
words of praise are spoken for me, I feel as one that 
lies unprotected before his enemies. In general, every 
evil to which we do not succumb is a benefactor. As 
the Sandwich Islander believes that the strength and 



COMPENSATION. 93 

valor of the enemy he kills passes into himself, so we 
gain the strength of the temptation we resist. 

The same guards which protect us from disaster, 
defect, and enmity, defend us, if we will, from selfish- 
ness and fraud. Bolts and bars are not the best of 
our institutions, nor is shrewdness in trade a mark of 
wisdom. Men suflfer all their life long, under the 
foolish superstition that they can be cheated. But it 
is as impossible for a man to be cheated by any one 
but himself as for a thing to be and not to be at the 
same time. There is a third silent party to all our 
bargains. The nature and soul of things takes on 
itself the guaranty of the fulfilment of every contract, 
so that honest service cannot come to loss. If you 
serve an ungrateful master, serve him the more. Put 
God in your debt. Every stroke shall be repaid. 
The longer the payment is withholden, the better for 
you ; for compound interest on compound interest is 
the rate and usage of this exchequer. 

The history of persecution is a history of endeavors 
to cheat nature, to make water run up hill, to twist a 
rope of sand. It makes no difference whether the 
actors be many or one, a tyrant or a mob. A mob is 
a society of bodies voluntarily bereaving themselves 
of reason, and traversing its work. The mob is man 
voluntarily descending to the nature of the beast. Its 
fit hour of activity is night. Its actions are insane, 
like its whole constitution. It persecutes a principle ; 
it would whip a right ; it would tar and feather jus- 
tice, by inilicting fire and outrage upon the houses 
and persons of those who have these. It resembles the 
prank of boys, who run with fire-engines to put out 



94 ESSAY III. 

the ruddy aurora streaming to the stars. The invio- 
late spirit turns their spite against the wrongdoers. 
The martyr cannot be dishonored. Every lash inflict- 
ed is a tongue of flame; every prison, a more illustri- 
ous abode ; every burned book or house enlightens the 
world; every suppressed or expunged word rever- 
f)erates through the earth from side to side. Hours of 
sanity and consideration are always arriving to com- 
munities, as to individuals, when the truth is seen, 
and the martyrs are justified. 

Thus do all things preach the indifferency of cir- 
cumstances. The man is all. Everything has two 
sides, a good and an evil. Every advantage has its 
tax. I learn to be content. But the doctrine of 
compensation is not the doctrine of indifferency. The 
thoughtless say on hearing these representations, 
What boots it to do well 1 There is one event to 
good and evil. If I gain any good, I must pay for 
it. If I lose any good, I gain some other. All actions 
are indifferent. 

There is a deeper fact in the soul than compensa- 
tion ; to wit, its own nature. The soul is not a com- 
pensation, but a life. The soul is. Under all this run- 
ning sea of circumstance, whose waters ebb and flow 
with perfect balance, lies the aboriginal abyss of real 
Being. Essence, or God, is not a relation, or a part, 
but the whole. Being is the vast affirmative, exclud- 
ing negation, self-balanced, and swallowing up all 
relations, parts, and times within itself. Nature, 
truth, virtue, are the influx from thence. Vice is the 
absence or departure of the same. JSTothing, False- 



COMPENSA TION 9 5 

hood, may indeed stand as the great Night or shade, 
on which, as a background, the living liniverse paints 
itself forth ; but no fact is begotten by it ; it cannot 
work ; for it is not. It cannot work any good ; it 
cannot work any harm. It is harm inasmuch as it is * 
worse not to be than to be. 

We feel defrauded of the retribution due to evil 
acts, because the criminal adheres to his vice and con- 
tumacy, and does not come to a crisis or judgment 
anywhere in visible nature. There is no stunning 
confutation of his nonsense before men and angels. 
Has he therefore outwitted the law ? Inasmuch as he 
carries the Inalignity and the lie with him, he so far 
deceases from nature. In some manner there will be 
a demonstration of the wrong to the understanding 
also ; but should we not see it, this deadly deduction 
makes square the eternal account. 

Neither can it be said, on the other hand, that the 
gain of rectitude must be bought by any loss. There 
is no penalty to virtue, no penalty to wisdom ; they 
are proper additions of being. In a virtuous action, 
I properly am ; in a virtuous act, I add to the world ; 
I plant into deserts conquered from Chaos and 
Nothing, and see the darkness receding on the limits 
of the horizon. There can be no excess to love, 
none to knowledge, none to beauty, when these attri- 
butes are considered in the purest sense. The soul 
refuses limits, and always affirms an Optimism, never 
a Pessimism. 

His life is a progress, and not a station. His in- 
stinct is trust. Our instinct uses "more'' and 
" less " in application to man, of the presence of the 



96 JESS AY II L 

soul, and not of its absence. The brave man is greater 
than the coward ; the true, the benevolent, the wise, 
is more a man, and not less, than the fool and knave. 
There is no tax on the good of virtue ; for that is the 
incoming of God himself, or absolute existence, with- 
out any comparative. Material good has its tax, and 
if it came without desert or sweat, has no root in me, 
and the next wind will blow it away. But all the 
good of nature is the souFs, and may be had, if paid 
for in nature's lawful coin ; that is, by labor which the 
heart and the head allow. I no longer wish to meet 
a good I do not earn ; for example, to find a pot of 
buried gold, knowing that it brings with it new bur- 
dens. I do not wish more external goods, — neither 
possessions, nor honors, nor powers, nor persons. 
The gain is apparent ; the tax is certain. But there 
is no tax on the knowledge that the compensation ex- 
ists, and that it is not desirable to dig up treasure. 
Herein I rejoice with a serene eternal peace. I con- 
tract the boundaries of possible mischief. I learn the 
wisdom of St. Bernard, "Nothing can work me 
damage except myself; the harm that I sustain I 
carry about with me, and never am a real sufferer 
but by my own fault." 

In the nature of the soul is the compensation for 
the inequalities of condition. The radical tragedy of 
nature seems to be the distinction of More and Less. 
How can Less not feel the pain ; how not feel indig- 
nation or malevolence towards More ? Look at those 
who have less faculty, and one feels sad, and knows 
not well what to make of it. He almost shuns their 
eye ; he fears they will upbraid God. What should 



COMPENSATION, 97 

they do ? It seems a great injustice. But see the 
facts nearly, and these mountainous inequalities van- 
ish. Love reduces them, as the sun melts the iceberg 
in the sea. The heart and soul of all men being one, 
this bitterness of His and Mine ceases. His is mine. 
I am my brother, and my brother is me. If I feel 
overshadowed and outdone by great neighbors, I can 
yet love ; I can still receive ; and he that loveth 
maketh his own the grandeur he loves. Thereby I 
make the discovery that my brother is my guardian, 
acting for me with the friendliest designs, and the 
estate I so admired and envied is my own. It is the 
nature of the soul to appropriate all things. Jesus 
and Shakespeare are fragments of the soul ; and by 
love I conquer and incorporate them in my own con- 
scious domain. His virtue, — is not that mine ? His 
wit, — if it cannot be made mine, it is not wit. 

Such, also, is the natural history of calamity. The 
changes which break up at short intervals the pros- 
perity of men are advertisements of a nature whose 
law is growth. Every soul is by this intrinsic neces- 
sity quitting its whole system of things, its friends, 
and home, and laws, and faith, as the shell-fish crawls 
out of its beautiful but stony case, because it no longer 
admits of its growth, and slowly forms a new house. 
In proportion to the vigor of the individual, these 
revolutions are frequent, until in some happier mind 
they are incessant, and all worldly relations hang very 
loosely about him ; becoming, as it were, a transparent 
fluid membrane through which the living form is seen, 
and not, as in most men, an indurated heterogeneous 
fabric of many dates, and of no settled character, in 
7 



98 ESSAY III. 

which the man is imprisoned. Then there can be en- 
largement, and the man of to-day scarcely recognizes 
the man of yesterday. And such should be the out- 
ward biography of man in time, a putting off of dead 
circumstances day by day, as he renews his raiment 
day by day. But to us, in our lapsed estate, resting, 
not advancing, resisting, not co-operating with the di- 
vine expansion, this growth comes by shocks. 

We cannot part with our friends. We cannot let 
our angels go. We do not see that they only go out, 
that archangels may come in. We are idolaters of 
the old. We do not believe in the riches of the soul, 
in its proper eternity and omnipresence. We do not 
believe there is any force in to-day to rival or recreate 
that beautiful yesterday. We linger in the ruins of 
the old tent, where once we had bread and shelter 
and organs, nor believe that the spirit can feed, cover, 
and nerve us again. We cannot again find aught so 
dear, so sweet, so graceful. But we sit and weep in 
vain. The voice of the Almighty saith, *' Up and on- 
ward for evermore ! " We cannot stay amid the 
ruins. Neither will we rely on the new ; and so we 
walk ever with reverted eyes, like those monsters who 
look backwards. 

And yet the compensations of calamity are made 
apparent to the understanding also, after long inter- 
vals of time. A fever, a mutilation, a cruel disap- 
pointment, a loss of wealth, a loss of friends, seems at 
the moment unpaid loss and unpayable. But the 
sure years reveal the deep remedial force that under- 
lies all facts. The death of a dear friend, wife, broth- 
er, lover, which seemed nothing but privation, some- 



COMPENSATION. 99 

what later assumes the aspect of a guide or genius ; 
for it commonly operates revolutions in our way of 
life, terminates an epoch of infancy or of youth which 
was waiting to be closed, breaks up a wonted occupa- 
tion, or a household, or style of living, and allows the 
formation of new ones more friendly to the growth of 
character. It permits or constrains the formation of 
new acquaintances, and the reception of new influences, 
that prove of the first importance to the next years ; 
and the man or woman who would have remained a 
sunny garden-flower, with no room for its roots and 
too much sunshine for its head, by the falling of the 
walls and the neglect of the gardener, is made the 
banian of the forest, yielding shade and fruit to wide 
neighborhoods of men. 



SPIRITUAL LAWS. 



The living Heaven thy prayers respect, 
House at once and architect, 
Quarrying man's rejected hours. 
Builds therewith eternal towers ; 
Sole and self-commanded works, 
Fears not undermining days. 
Grows by decays, 

And, by the famous might that lurks 
In reaction and recoil. 
Makes flame to freeze, and ice to boil 5 
Forging, through swart arms of Offence, 
The silver seat of Innocence. 



ESSAY IV. 



SPIRITUAL LAWS. 




HEN the act of reflection takes place in the 
mind, when we look at ourselves in the 
light of thought, we discover that our life 
is embosomed in beauty. Behind us, as 
we go, all things assume pleasing forms, as clouds do 
far off. Not only things familiar and stale, but even 
the tragic and terrible, are comely as they take their 
place in the pictures of memory. The river-bank, the 
weed at the water-side, the old house, the foolish per- 
son, — however neglected in the passing, — have a 
grace in the past. Even the corpse that has lain in 
the chambers has added a solemn ornament to the 
house. The soul will not know either deformity or 
pain. If, in the hours of clear reason, we should speak 
the severest truth, we should say, that we had never 
made a sacrifice. In these hours the mind seems so 
great that nothing can be taken from us that seems 
much. All loss, all pain, is particular ; the universe 
remains to the heart unhurt. Neither vexations nor 
calamities abate our trust. No man ever stated his 
griefs as lightly as he might. Allow for exaggeration 
in the most patient and sorely ridden hack that ever 



I04 IJSSAY IV. 

was driven. For it is only the finite that has wrought 
and suffered ; the infinite lies stretched in smiling re- 
pose. 

The intellectual life may be kept clean and health- 
ful, if man will live the life of nature, and not import 
into his mind difficulties which are none of his. No 
man need be perplexed in his speculations. Let him 
do and say what strictly belongs to him ; and, though 
very ignorant of books, his nature shall not yield him 
any intellectual obstructions and doubts. Our young 
people are diseased with the theological problems of 
original sin, origin of evil, predestination, and the 
like. These never presented a practical difficulty to 
any man, never darkened across any man's road, 
who did not go out of his way to seek them. These 
are the soul's mumps, and measles, and whooping- 
coughs ; and those who have not caught them cannot 
describe their health or prescribe the cure. A simple 
mind will not know these enemies. It is quite anoth- 
er thing that he should be able to give account of 
h'is faith, and expound to another the theory of his 
self-union and freedom. This requires rare gifts. 
Yet, without this self-knowledge, there may be a syl- 
van strength and integrity in that which he is. " A 
few strong instincts and a few plain rules " suffice us. 

My will never gave the images in my mind the 
rank they now take, The regular course of studies, 
the years of academical and professional education, 
have not yielded me better facts than some idle books 
under the bench at the Latin School. What we do 
not call education is more precious than that which 
we call so. We form no guess, at the time of receiv- 



SPIRITUAL LAWS, 105 

ing a thought, of its comparative value. And educa- 
tion often wastes its effort in attempts to thwart and 
balk this natural magnetism, which is sure to select 
what belongs to it. 

In like manner, our moral nature is vitiated by any 
interference of our will. People represent virtue as a 
struggle, and take to themselves great airs upon their 
attainments ; and the question is everywhere vexed, 
when a noble nature is commended, whether the man 
is not better who strives with temptation. But there 
is no merit in the matter. Either God is there, or he 
is not there. We love characters in proportion as 
they are impulsive and spontaneous. The less a man 
thinks or knows about his virtues, the better we like 
him. Timoleon's victories are the best victories, 
which ran and flowed like Homer's verses, Plutarch 
said. When we see a soul whose acts are all regal, 
graceful, and pleasant as roses, we must thank God 
that such things can be and are, and not turn sourly 
on the angel, and say, " Crump is a better man with 
his grunting resistance to all his native devils." 

Not less conspicuous is the preponderance of nature 
over will in all practical life. There is less intention 
in history than we ascribe to it. We impute deep- 
laid, far-sighted plans to C^sar and Napoleon ; but 
the best of their power was in nature, not in them. 
Men of an extraordinary success, in their honest mo- 
ments, have always sung, " Not unto us, not unto us." 
According to the faith of their times, they have built 
altars to Fortune, or to Destiny, or to St. Julian. 
Their success lay in their parallelism to the course of 
thought which found in them an unobstructed chan- 



i66 i:S8AY IV. 

nel ; and the wonders of which they were the visible 
conductors seemed to the eye their deed. Did the 
wires generate the galvanism ? It is even true that 
there was less in them on which they could reflect, 
than in another ; as the virtue of a pipe is to be 
smooth and hollow. That which externally seemed 
will and immovableness was willingness and self-anni- 
hilation. Could Shakespeare give a theory of Shake- 
speare ? Could ever a man of prodigious mathematical 
genius convey to others any insight into his methods 1 
If he could communicate that secret, it would instantly 
lose its exaggerated value, blending with the daylight 
and the vital energy the power to stand and to go. 

The lesson is forcibly taught by these observations, 
that our life might be much easier and simpler than 
we make it ; that the world might be a happier place 
than it is ; that there is no need of struggles, convul- 
sions, and despairs, of the wringing of the hands 
and the gnashing of the teeth ; that we miscreate 
our own evils. We interfere with the optimism of 
nature ; for, whenever we get this vantage-ground of 
the past, or of a wiser mind in the present, we are 
able to discern that we are begirt with laws which 
execute themselves. 

The face of external nature teaches the same les- 
son. Nature will not have us fret and fume. She 
does not like our benevolence or our learning much 
better than she likes our frauds and wars. When 
we come out of the caucus, or the bank, or the Abo- 
lition-convention, or the Temperance-meeting, or the 
Transcendental club, into the fields and woods, she 
says to us, " So hot ? my little sir." 



SPIRITUAL LAWS. 107 

We are full of mechanical actions. We must needs 
intermeddle, and have things in our own way, until 
the sacrifices and virtues of society are odious. Love 
should make joy ; but our benevolence is unhappy. 
Our Sunday-schools, and churches, and pauper-socie- 
ties are yokes to the neck. We pain ourselves to 
please nobody. There are natural ways of arriving 
at the same ends at which these aim, but do not 
arrive. Why should all virtue work in one and the 
same way ? Why should all give dollars ? It is 
very inconvenient to us country folk, and we do not 
think any good will come of it. We have not dol- 
lars ; merchants have ; let them give them. Farm- 
ers will give corn ; poets will sing ; women will sew ; 
laborers will lend a hand; the children will bring 
flowers. And why drag this dead weight of a Sun- 
day-school over the whole Christendom'? It is nat- 
ural and beautiful that childhood should inquire, and 
maturity should teach ; but it is time enough to an- 
swer questions when they are asked. Do not shut 
up the young people against their will in a pew, and 
force the children to ask them questions for an hour 
against their will. 

If we look wider, things are all alike ; laws, and 
letters, and creeds, and modes of living, seem a trav- 
estie of truth. Our society is encumbered by pon- 
derous machinery, which resembles the endless aque- 
ducts which the Romans built over hill and dale, 
and which are superseded by the discovery of the 
law that water rises to the level of its source. It is 
a Chinese wall which any nimble Tartar can leap 
over. It is a standing army, not so good as a peace. 



io8 * ESSAY IV. 

It is a graduated, titled, richly-appointed empire, quite 
superfluous when town-meetings are found to answer 
just as well. 

Let us draw a lesson from nature, which always 
works by short ways. When the fruit is ripe, it 
falls. When the fruit is despatched, the leaf falls. 
The circuit of the waters is mere falling. The walk- 
ing of man and all animals is a falling forward. All 
our manual labor and works of strength, as prying, 
splitting, digging, rowing, and so forth, are done by 
dint of continual falling ; and the globe, earth, moon, 
comet, sun, star, fall for ever and ever. 

The simplicity of the universe is very different 
from the simplicity of a machine. He who sees 
moral nature out and out, and thoroughly knows 
how knowledge is acquired and character formed, is a 
pedant. The simplicity of nature is not that which 
may easily be read, but is inexhaustible. The last 
analysis can no wise be made. We judge of a man's 
wisdom by his hope, knowing that the perception of 
the inexhaustibleness of nature is an immortal youth. 
The wild fertility of nature is felt in comparing our 
rigid names and reputations with our fluid conscious- 
ness. We pass in the world for sects and schools, for 
erudition and piety, and we are all the time jejune 
babes. One sees very well how Pyrrhonism grew up. 
Every man sees that he is that middle point, whereof 
every thing may be affirmed and denied with equal 
reason. He is old, he is young, he is very wise, he is 
altogether ignorant. He hears and feels what you 
say of the seraphim, and of the tin-pedler. There is 
no permanent wise man, except in the figment of the 



SPIRITUAL LAWS. 109 

Stoics. We side with the hero, as we read or paint, 
against the coward and the robber ; but we have been 
ourselves that coward and robber, and shall be again, 
not in the low circumstance, but in comparison with 
the grandeurs possible to the soul. 

A little consideration of what takes place around 
us every day would show us that a higher law than 
that of our will regulates events; that our painful 
labors are unnecessary and fruitless ; that only in our 
easy, simple, spontaneous action are we strong, and 
by contenting ourselves with obedience we become 
divine. Belief and love, — a believing love will re- 
lieve us of a vast load of care. O my brothers, God 
exists. There is a soul at the centre of nature, and 
over the will of every man, so that none of us can 
wrong the universe. It has so infused its strong 
enchantment into nature, that we prosper when we 
accept its advice ; and when we struggle to wound its 
creatures, our hands are glued to our sides, or they 
beat our own breasts. The whole course of things 
goes to teach us faith. We need only obey. There 
is guidance for each of us, and by lowly listening we 
shall hear the right word. Why need you choose so 
painfully your place, and occupation, and associates, 
and modes of action, and of entertainment ? Certain- 
ly there is a possible right for you that precludes the 
need of balance and wilful election. For you there is 
a reality, a fit place and congenial duties. Place your- 
self in the middle of the stream of power and wis- 
dom which animates all whom it floats, and you are 
without effort impelled to truth, to right, and a perfect 
contentment. Then you put all gainsayers in the 



no ESSAY IK 

wrong. Then you are the world, the measure of 
right, of truth, of beauty. If we will not be mar-plots 
with our miserable interferences, the work, the society, 
letters, arts, science, religion of men would go on far 
better than now, and the heaven predicted from the 
beginning of the world, and still predicted from the 
bottom of the heart, would organize itself, as do now 
the rose, and the air, and the sun. 

I say, do not choose ; but that is a iSgure of speech 
by which I would distinguish what is commonly 
called choice among men, and which is a partial act, 
the choice of the hands, of the eyes, of the appetites, 
and not a whole act of the man. But that which I 
call right or goodness is the choice of my constitu- 
tion ; and that which I call heaven, and inwardly 
aspire after, is the state or circumstance desirable to 
my constitution ; and the action which I in all my 
years tend to do is the work for my faculties. We 
must hold a man amenable to reason for the choice of 
his daily craft or profession. It is not an excuse any 
longer for his deeds, that they are the custom of his 
trade. What business has he with an evil trade? 
Has he not a calling in his character. 

Each man has his own vocation. The talent is the 
call. There is one direction in which all space is 
open to him. He has faculties silently inviting him 
thither to endless exertion. He is like a ship in a 
river; he runs against obstructions on every side but 
one ; on that side all obstruction is taken away, and 
he sweeps serenely over a deepening channel into an 
infinite sea. This talent and this call depend on his 
organization, or the mode in which the general soul 



SPIRITUAL LAWS. in 

incarnates itself in him. He inclines to do some- 
thing which is easy to him, and good when it is done, 
but which no other man can do. He has no rival. 
For the more truly he consults his own powers, 
the more difference will his work exhibit from the 
work of any other. His ambition is exactly propor- 
tioned to his powers. The height of the pinnacle is 
determined by the breadth of the base. Every man 
has this call of the power to do somewhat unique, and 
no man has any other call. The pretence that he 
has another call, a summons by name and personal 
election and outward " signs that mark him extraor- 
dinary, and not in the roll of common men,'' is 
fanaticism, and betrays obtuseness to perceive that 
there is one mind in all the individuals, and no 
respect of persons therein. 

By doing his work, he makes the need felt which 
he can supply, and creates the taste by which he is en- 
joyed. By doing his own work, he imfolds himself. 
It is the vice of our public speaking that it has not 
abandonment. Somewhere, not only every orator but 
every man should let out all the length of all the 
reins ; should find or make a frank and hearty expres- 
sion of what force and meaning is in him. The com- 
mon experience is that the man fits himself as well 
as he can to the customary details of that work or 
trade he falls into, and tends it as a dog turns a spit. 
Then is he a part of the machine he moves ; the man 
is lost. Until he can manage to communicate him- 
self to others in his full stature and proportion, he 
does not yet find his vocation. He must find in that 
an outlet for his character, so that he may justify his 



112 ESSAY IV. 

work to their eyes. If the labor is mean, let him by 
his thinking and character make it liberal. Whatever 
he knows and thinks, whatever in his apprehension is 
worth doing, that let him communicate, or men will 
never know and honor him aright. Foolish, when- 
ever you take the meanness and formality of that thing 
you do, instead of converting it into the obedient 
spiracle of your character and aims. 

We like only such actions as have already long had 
the praise of men, and do not perceive that anything 
man can do may be divinely done. We think great- 
ness entailed or organized in some places or duties, in 
certain offices or occasions, and do not see that Pa- 
ganini can extract rapture from a catgut, and Eulen- 
stein from a jews-harp, and a nimble-fingered lad out 
of shreds of paper with his scissors, and Landseer out 
of swine, and the hero out of the pitiful habitation and 
company in which he was hidden. What we call ob- 
scure condition or vulgar society is that condition and 
society whose poetry is not yet written, but which you 
shall presently make as enviable and renowned as any. 
In our estimates, let us take a lesson from kings. 
The parts of hospitality, the connection of families, the 
impressiveness of death, and a thousand other things, 
royalty makes its own estimate of, and a royal mind 
will. To make habitually a new estimate, — that is 
elevation. 

What a man does, that he has. What has he to 
do with hope or fear ? In himself is his might. Let 
him regard no good as solid, but that which is in his 
nature, and which must grow out of him as long as 
he exists. The goods of fortune may come and go 



SPIRITUAL LAWS, 113 

like summer leaves; let him scatter them on every 
wind as the momentary signs of his infinite produc- 
tiveness. 

He may have his own. A man^s genius, the qual- 
ity that differences him from every other, the suscepti- 
bility to one class of influences, the selection of what 
is fit for him, the rejection of what is unfit, determines 
for him the character of the universe. A man is a 
method, a progressive arrangement ; a selecting prin- 
ciple, gathering his like to him, wherever he goes. 
He takes only his own out of the multiplicity that 
sweeps and circles round him. He is like one of 
those booms which are set out from the shore on rivers 
to catch drift-wood, or like the loadstone amongst 
splinters of steel. Those facts, words, persons, which 
dwell in his memory without his being able to say 
why, remain, because they have a relation to him not 
less real for being as yet unapprehended. They are 
symbols of value to him, as they can interpret parts 
of his consciousness which he would vainly seek words 
for in the conventional images of books and other 
minds. What attracts my attention shall have it, as 
I will go to the man who knocks at my door, whilst 
a thousand persons, as worthy, go by it, to whom I 
give no regard. It is enough that these particulars 
speak to me. A few anecdotes, a few traits of charac- 
ter, manners, face, a few incidents, have an emphasis 
in your memory out of all proportion to their appar- 
ent significance, if you measure them by the ordinary 
standards. They relate to your gift. Let them have 
their weight, and do not reject them, and cast about 
for illustration and facts more usual in literature. 
8 



114 ESSAY IV. 

What your heart thinks great is great. The soul's 
emphasis is always right. 

Over all things that are agreeable to his nature and 
genius, the man has the highest right. Everywhere 
he may take what belongs to his spiritual estate, nor 
can he take anything else, though all doors were open, 
nor can all the force of men hinder him from taking 
so much. It is vain to attempt to keep a secret from 
one who has a right to know it. It will tell itself. 
That mood into which a friend can bring us is his do- 
minion over us. To the thoughts of that state of 
mind he has a right. All the secrets of that state of 
mind he can compel. This is a law which statesmen 
use in practice. All the terrors of the French Repub- 
lic, which held Austria in awe, were unable to com- 
mand her diplomacy. But Napoleon sent to Vienna 
M. de ISTarbonne, one of the old noblesse, with the 
morals, manners, and name of that interest, saying, 
that it was indispensable to send to the old aristocracy 
of Europe men of the same connection, which, in fact, 
constitutes a sort of free-masonry. M. de Narbonne, 
in less than a fortnight, penetrated all the secrets of 
the imperial cabinet. 

Nothing seems so easy as to speak and to be un- 
derstood. Yet a man may come to find that the 
strongest of defences and of ties, — that he has been 
understood ; and he who has received an opinion may 
come to find it the most inconvenient of bonds. 

If a teacher have any opinion which he wishes to 
conceal, his pupils will become as fully indoctrinated 
into that as into any which he publishes. If you 
pour water into a vessel twisted into coils and angles, 



SPIRITUAL LAWS. 



"5 



it is vain to say, I will pour it only into this or that ; 
it will find its level in all. Men feel and act the 
consequences of your doctrine, without being able to 
show how they follow. Show us an arc of the curve, 
and a good mathematician will find out the whole fig- 
ure. We are always reasoning from the seen to the 
unseen. Hence the perfect intelligence that subsists 
between wise men of remote ages. A man cannot 
bury his meaning so deep in his book, but time and 
like-minded men will find them. Plato had a secret 
doctrine, had he ? What secret can he conceal from 
the eyes of Bacon ? of Montaigne ? of Kant '? There- 
fore, Aristotle says of his works, " They are published 
and not published." 

No man can learn what he has not preparation for 
learning, however near to his eyes is the object. A 
chemist may tell his most precious secrets to a carpen- 
ter, and he shall be never the wiser, — the secrets he 
would not utter to a chemist for an estate. God 
screens us evermore from premature ideas. Our eyes 
are holden that we cannot see things that stare us in 
the face, until the hour arrives when the mind is ri- 
pened ; then we behold them, and the time when we 
saw them not is like a dream. 

Not in nature but in man is all the beauty and 
worth he sees. The world is very empty, and is in- 
debted to this gilding, exalting soul for all its pride. 
" Earth fills her lap with splendors " not her own. 
The vale of Tempe, Tivoli, and Rome are earth and 
water, rocks and sky. There are as good earth and 
water in a thousand places, yet how unafFecting ! 

People are not the better for the sun and moon, the 



ii6 £SSAY IV^ 

horizon and the trees ; as it is not observed that the 
keepers of Eoman galleries, or the valets of painters, 
have any elevation of thought, or that librarians are 
vs^iser men than others. There are graces in the de- 
meanor of a polished and noble person, which are 
lost upon the eye of a churl. These are like the 
stars whose light has not yet reached us. 

He may see what he maketh. Our dreams are the 
sequel of our waking knowledge. The visions of the 
night bear some proportion to the visions of the day. 
Hideous dreams are exaggerations of the sins of the 
day. We see our evil affections embodied in bad 
physiognomies. On the Alps, the traveller sometimes 
beholds his own shadow magnified to a giant, so that 
every gesture of his hand is terrific. " My children," 
said an old man to his boys scared by a figure in the 
dark entry, "my children, you will never see any- 
thing worse than yourselves." As in dreams, so in 
the scarcely less fluid events of the world, every man 
sees himself in colossal, without knowing that it is 
himself. The good, compared to the evil which he 
sees, is as his own good to his own evil. Every qual- 
ity of his mind is magnified in some one acquaintance, 
and every emotion of his heart in some one. He is 
like a quincunx of trees, which counts five, east, west> 
north, or south ; or, an initial, medial, and terminal 
acrostic. And why not ? He cleaves to one person, 
and avoids another, according to their likeness or un- 
likeness to himself, truly seeking himself in his asso- 
ciates, and moreover in his trade, and habits, and 
gestures, and meats, and drinks ; and comes at last 
to be faithfully represented by every view you take of 
his circumstances. 



SPIRITUAL LAWS. 117 

He may read what he writes. What can we see 
or acquire, but what we are 1 You have observed a 
skilful man reading Virgil. Well, that author is a 
thousand books to a thousand persons. Take the 
book into your two hands, and read your eyes out ; 
you will never find what I find. If any ingenious 
reader would have a monopoly of the wisdom or 
delight he gets, he is as secure now the book is Eng- 
lished, as if it were imprisoned in the Pelews' tongue. 
It is with a good book as it is with good company. 
Introduce a base person among gentlemen ; it is all 
to no purpose ; he is not their fellow. Every society 
protects itself. The company is perfectly safe, and he 
is not one of them, though his body is in the room. 

What avails it to fight with the eternal laws of 
mind, which adjust the relation of all persons to each 
other, by the mathematical measure of their havings 
and beings'? Gertrude is enamoured of Guy; how 
high, how aristocratic, how Eoman his mien and man- 
ners ! to live with him were life indeed, and no pur- 
chase is too great ; and heaven and earth are moved 
to that end. Well, Gertrude has Guy ; but what 
now avails how high, how aristocratic, how Roman 
his mien and manners, if his heart and aims are in the 
tienate, in the theatre, and in the billiard-room, and 
she has no aims, no conversation, that can enchant 
her graceful lord ? 

He shall have his own society. We can love noth- 
ing but nature. The most wonderful talents, the 
most meritorious exertions, really avail very little with 
us ; but nearness or likeness of nature, — how beauti- 
■1 hi is the ease of its victory ! Persons approach us 



ii8 ESSAY IV. 

famous for their beauty, for their accomplishments, 
worthy of all wonder for their charms and gifts ; they 
dedicate their whole skill to the hour and the compa- 
ny, with very imperfect result. To be sure, it would 
be ungrateful in us not to praise them loudly. Then, 
when all is done, a person of related mind, a brother 
or sister by nature, comes to us so softly and easily, 
so nearly and intimately, as if it were the blood in 
our proper veins, that we feel as if some one was 
gone, instead of another having come ; we are utterly 
relieved and refreshed ; it is a sort of joyful solitude. 
We foolishly think in our days of sin, that we must 
court friends by compliance to the customs of society, 
to its dress, its breeding, and its estimates. But only 
that soul can be my friend which I encounter on the 
line of my own march, that soul to which I do not 
decline, and which does not decline to me, but, native 
of the same celestial latitude, repeats in its own all 
my experience. The scholar forgets himself, and 
apes the customs and costumes of the man of the 
world, to deserve the smile of beauty, and follows 
some giddy girl, not yet taught by the religious pas- 
sion to know the noble woman with all that is serene, 
oracular, and beautiful in her soul. Let him be great 
and love shall follow him. Nothing is more deeply 
punished than the neglect of the affinities by which 
alone society should be formed, and the insane levity 
of choosing associates by others' eyes. 

He may set his own rate. It is a maxim worthy 
of all acceptation, that a man may have that allow- 
ance he takes. Take the place and attitude which 
belong to you, and all men acquiesce. The world 



SPIRITUAL LAWS. 119 

must be just. It leaves every man, with profound 
unconcern, to set his own rate. Hero or driveller, it 
meddles not in the matter. It will certainly accept 
your own measure of your doing and being, whether 
you sneak about and deny your own name, or whether 
you see your work produced to the concave sphere of 
the heavens, one with the revolution of the stars. 

The same reality pervades all teaching. The man 
may teach by doing, and not otherwise. If he can 
communicate himself, he can teach, but not by words. 
He teaches who gives, and he learns who receives. 
There is no teaching until the pupil is brought into 
the same state or principle in which you are ; a trans- 
fusion takes place ; he is you, and you are he ; then 
is a teaching ; and by no unfriendly chance or bad 
company can he ever quite lose the benefit. But your 
propositions run out of one ear as they ran in at the 
other. We see it advertised that Mr. Grand will 
deliver an oration on the Fourth of July, and Mr. 
Hand before the Mechanics' Association, and we do 
not go thither, because we know that these gentlemen 
will not communicate their own character and expe- 
rience to the company. If we had reason to expect 
such a confidence, we should go through all inconven- 
ience and opposition. The sick would be carried in 
litters. But a public oration is an escapade, a non- 
committal, an apology, a gag, and not a communica- 
tion, not a speech, not a man. 

A like Nemesis presides over all intellectual works. 
We have yet to learn, that the thing uttered in words 
is not therefore affirmed. It must affirm itself, or no 
forms of logic or of oath can give it evidence. The 



120 ESSAY IV. 

sentence must also contain its own apology for being 
spoken. 

The effect of any writing on the public mind is 
mathematically measurable by its depth of thought. 
How much water does it draw ? If it awaken you to 
think, if it lift you from your feet with the great voice 
of eloquence, then the effect is to be wide, slow, per- 
manent, over the minds of men ; if the pages instruct 
you not, they will die like flies in the hour. The way 
to speak and write what shall not go out of fashion is 
to speak and write sincerely. The argument which 
has not power to reach my own practice, I may w^ell 
doubt, will fail to reach yours. But take Sidney's 
maxim : " Look in thy heart, and write." He that 
writes to himself writes to an eternal public. That 
statement only is fit to be made public which you 
have come at in attempting to satisfy your own curi- 
osity. The writer who takes his subject from his 
ear, and not from his heart, should know that he has 
lost as much as he seems to have gained ; and when 
the empty book has gathered all its praise, and half 
the people say, " What poetry ! what genius ! " it 
still needs fuel to make fire. That*only profits which 
is profitable. Life alone can impart life ; and though 
we should burst, we can only be valued as we make 
ourselves valuable. There is no luck in literary repu- 
tation. They who make up the final verdict upon 
every book are not the partial and noisy readers of 
the hour when it appears ; but a court as of angels, 
a public not to be bribed, not to be entreated, and not 
to be overawed, decides upon every man's title to 
fame. Only those books come down which deserve 



SPIRITUAL LAWS. 121 

to last. Gilt edges, vellum, and morocco, and presen- 
tation-copies to all the libraries, will not preserve a 
book in circulation beyond its intrinsic date. It must 
go with all Walpole's Noble and Eoyal Authors to its 
fate. Blackmore, Kotzebue, or PoUok may endure for 
a night, but Moses and Homer stand for ever. There 
are not in the world at any one time more than a 
dozen persons who read and understand Plato, — 
never enough to pay for an edition of his works; 
yet to every generation these come duly down, for the 
sake of those few persons, as if God brought them in 
his hand. " No book,'' said Bentley, " was ever writ- 
ten down by any but itself The permanence of all 
books is fixed by no effort friendly or hostile, but by 
their own specific gravity, or the intrinsic importance 
of their contents to the constant mind of man, " Do 
not trouble yourself too much about the light on your 
statue,'' said Michel Angelo to the young sculptor; 
" the light of the public square will test its value." 

In like manner the effect of every action is mea- 
sured by the depth of the sentiment from which it pro- 
ceeds. The great man knew not that he was great. 
It took a century or two for that fact to appear. 
What he did, he did because he must ; it was the 
most natural thing in the world, and grew out of the 
circumstances of the moment. But now, everything 
he did, even to the lifting of his finger or the eating 
of bread, looks large, all-related, and is called an in- 
stitution. 

These are the demonstrations in a few particulars 
of the genius of nature ; they show the direction of 
the stream. But the stream is blood ; every drop is 



122 ESSAY IV. 

alive. Truth has not single victories ; all things are 
its organs, — not only dust and stones, but errors and 
lies. The laws of disease, physicians say, are as beau- 
tiful as the laws of health. Our philosophy is affirm- 
ative, and readily accepts the testimony of negative 
facts, as every shadow points to the sun. By a divine 
necessity, every fact in nature is constrained to offer 
its testimony. 

Human character evermore publishes itself. The 
most fugitive deed and word, the mere air of doing a 
thing, the intimated purpose, expresses character. If 
you act, you show character ; if you sit still, if you 
sleep, you show it. You think, because you have 
spoken nothing when others spoke, and have given no 
opinion on the times, on the Church, on slavery, on 
marriage, on socialism, on secret societies, on the col- 
lege, on parties and persons, that your verdict is still 
expected with curiosity as a reserved v/isdom. Far 
otherwise; your silence answers very loud. You 
have no oracle to utter, and your fellow-men have 
learned that you cannot help them ; for oracles speak. 
Doth not wisdom cry, and understanding put forth 
her voice ? 

Dreadful limits are set in nature to the powers of 
dissimulation. Truth tyrannizes over the unwilling 
members of the body. Faces never lie, it is said. 
No man need be deceived, who will study the changes 
of expression. When a man speaks the truth in the 
spirit of truth, his eye is as clear as the heavens. 
When he has base ends, and speaks falsely, the eye is 
muddy and sometimes asquint. 

I have heard an experienced counsellor say, that he 



SPIRITUAL LAWS, 123 

never feared the effect upon a jury of a lawyer who 
does not believe in his heart that his client ought to 
have a verdict. If he does not believe it, his unbelief 
will appear to the jury, despite all his protestations, 
and will become their unbelief. This is that law 
whereby a work of art, of whatever kind, sets us in 
the same state of mind wherein the artist was when he 
made it. That which we do not believe, we cannot 
adequately say, though we may repeat the words 
never so often. It was this conviction which Sweden- 
borg expressed, when he described a group of persons 
in the spiritual world endeavoring in vain to articulate 
a proposition which they did not believe; but they 
could not, though they twisted and folded their lips 
even to indignation. 

A man passes for that he is worth. Very idle is 
all curiosity concerning other people's estimate of us, 
and all fear of remaining unknown is not less so. 
If a man know that he can do any thing, — that he 
can do it better than any one else, — he has a pledge 
of the acknowledgment of that fact by all persons. 
The world is full of judgment-days; and into every 
assembly that a man enters, in every action he at- 
tempts, he is gauged and stamped. In every troop 
of boys that whoop and run in each yard and square, 
a new-comer is as well and accurately weighed in the 
course of a few days, and stamped with his right 
number, as if he had undergone a formal trial of his 
strength, speed, and temper. A stranger comes from 
a distant school, with better dress, with trinkets in his 
pockets, with airs and pretensions : an older boy says 
to himself, " It's of no use ; we shall find him out to- 



124 ESSAY IV. 

morrow." — " What has he done '? " is the divine ques- 
tion which searches men, and transpierces every false 
reputation. A fop may sit in any chair of the world, 
nor be distinguished for his hour from Homer and 
Washington ; but there need never be any doubt con- 
cerning the respective ability of human beings. Pre- 
tension may sit still, but cannot act. Pretension 
never feigned an act of real greatness. Pretension 
never wrote an Iliad, nor drove back Xerxes, nor 
Christianized the world, nor abolished slavery. 

As much virtue as there is, so much appears ; as 
much goodness as there is, so much reverence it com- 
mands. All the devils respect virtue. The high, the 
generous, the self-devoted sect will always instruct and 
command mankind. Never was a sincere word utter- 
ly lost. Never a magnanimity fell to the ground, but 
there is some heart to greet and accept it unexpect- 
edly. A man passes for that he is worth. What he 
is engraves itself on his face, on his form, on his for- 
tunes, in letters of light. Concealment avails him 
nothing ; boasting, nothing. There is confession in 
the glances of our eyes, in our smiles, in salutations, 
and the grasp of hands. His sin bedaubs him, mars 
all his good impression. Men know not why they do 
not trust him ; but they do not trust him. His vice 
glasses his eye, cuts lines of mean expression in his 
cheek, pinches the nose, sets the mark of the beast 
on the back of the head, and writes O fool ! fool ! on 
the forehead of a king. 

If you would not be known to do any thing, never 
do it. A man may play the fool in the drifts of a 
desert, but every grain of sand shall seem to see. He 



SPIRITUAL LAWS. 125 

may be a solitary eater, but he cannot keep his fool- 
ish counsel. A broken complexion, a swinish look, 
ungenerous acts, and the want of due knowledge, — 
all blab. Can a cook, a Chiffinch, an lachimo, be 
mistaken for Zeno or Paul? Confucius exclaimed, 
^' How can a man be concealed ! How can a man be 
concealed!" 

On the other hand, the hero fears not, that, if he 
withhold the avowal of a just and brave act, it will 
go unwitnessed and unloved. One knows it, — him- 
self, — and is pledged by it to sweetness of peace, and 
to nobleness of aim, which will prove in the end a 
better proclamation of it than the relating of the inci- 
dent. Virtue is the adherence in action to the nature 
of things, and the nature of things makes it prevalent. 
It consists in a perpetual substitution of being for 
seeming ; and with sublime propriety God is described 
as sajdng, I AM. 

The lesson which these observations convey is. Be, 
and not seem. Let us acquiesce. Let us take our 
bloated nothingness out of the path of the divine cir- 
cuits. Let us unlearn our wisdom of the world. Let 
us lie low in the Lord's power, and learn that truth 
alone makes rich and great. 

If you visit your friend, why need you apologize for 
not having visited him, and waste his time and deface 
your own act? Visit him now. Let him feel that 
the highest love has come to see him, in thee, its low- 
est organ. Or why need you torment yourself and 
friend by secret self-reproaches that you have not as- 
sisted him or complimented him with gifts and saluta- 
tions heretofore ? Be a gift and a benediction. Shine 



126 i:SSAY IV. 

with real light, and not with the borrowed reflection 
of gifts. Common men are apologies for men ; they 
bow the head, excuse themselves with prolix reasons, 
and accumulate appearances, because the substance is 
not. 

"We are full of these superstitions of sense, the wor- 
ship of magnitude. We call the poet inactive, because 
he is not a president, a merchant, or a porter. We 
adore an institution, and do not see that it is founded 
on a thought which we have. But real action is in 
silent moments. The epochs of our life are not in 
the visible facts of our choice of a calling, our marriage, 
our acquisition of an office, and the like, but in a si- • 
lent thought by the way-side as we walk ; in a thought 
which revises our entire manner of life, and says, 
" Thus hast thou done, but it were better thus." And 
all our after years, like menials, serve and wait on 
this, and, according to their ability, execute its will. 
This revisal or correction is a constant force, which, 
as a tendency, reaches through our lifetime. The ob- 
ject of the man, the aim of these moments, is to make 
daylight shine through him, to suffer the law to trav- 
erse his whole being without obstruction, so that, on 
what point soever of his doing your eye falls, it shall 
report truly of his character, whether it be his diet, his 
house, his religious forms, his society, his mirth, his 
vote, his opposition. Now he is not homogeneous, but 
heterogeneous, and the ray does not traverse ; there 
are no thorough lights : but the eye of the beholder is 
puzzled, detecting many unlike tendencies, and a life 
not yet at one. 

Why should we make it a point with our false 



SPIRITUAL LAWS. 127 

modesty to disparage that man we are, and that form 
of being assigned to us 1 A good man is contented. 
I love and honor Epaminondas, but I do not wish to 
be Epaminondas. I hold it more just to love the 
world of this hour, than the world of his hour. Nor 
can you, if I am true, excite me to the least uneasi- 
ness by saying, " He acted, and thou sittest still." I 
see action to be good, when the need is, and sitting 
still to be also good. Epaminondas, if he was the 
man I take him for, would have sat still with joy and 
peace, if his lot had been mine. Heaven is large, 
and affords space for all modes of love and fortitude. 
"Why should we be busybodies and superserviceable ? 
Action and inaction are alike to the true. One piece 
of the tree is cut for a weathercock, and one for the 
sleeper of a bridge ; the virtue of the wood is apparent 
in both. 

I desire not to disgrace the soul. The fact that I 
am here certainly shows me that the soul had need of 
an organ here. Shall I not assume the post 1 Shall 
I skulk and dodge and duck with my unseasonable 
apologies and vain modesty, and imagine my being 
here impertinent? less pertinent than Epaminondas 
or Homer being there ? and that the soul did not 
know its own needs '? Besides, without any reason- 
ing on the matter, I have no discontent. The good 
soul nourishes me, and unlocks new magazines of 
power and enjoyment to me every day. I will not 
meanly decline the immensity of good, because I have 
heard that it has come to others in another shape. 

Besides, why should we be cowed by the name of 
Action ? 'Tis a trick of the senses, — no more. We 



128 ESSAY IV. 

know that the ancestor of every action is a thought. 
The poor mind does not seem to itself to be anything, 
unless it have an outside badge, — some Gentoo diet, 
or Quaker coat, or Calvinistic prayer-meeting, or 
philanthropic society, or a great donation, or a high 
office, or, any how, some wild contrasting action to 
testify that it is somewhat. The rich mind lies in the 
sun and sleeps, and is Nature. To think is to act. 

Let us, if we must have great actions, make our 
own so. All action is of an infinite elasticity, and 
the least admits of being inflated with the celestial air 
until it eclipses the sun and moon. Let us seek one 
peace by fidelity. Let me heed my duties. Why need 
I go gadding into the scenes and philosophy of Greek 
and Italian history, before I have justified myself to 
my benefactors ? How dare I read Washington's 
campaigns, when I have not answered the letters of 
my own correspondents ? Is not that a just objection 
to much of our reading ? It is a pusillanimous deser- 
tion of our work to gaze after our neighbors. It is 
peeping. Byron says of Jack Bunting, — 

" He knew not what to say, and so he swore." 

I may say it of our preposterous use of books, — He 
knew not what to do, and so he read. I can think of 
nothing to fill my time with, and I find the Life of 
Brant. It is a very extravagant compliment to pay 
to Brant, or to General Schuyler, or to General 
Washington. My time should be as good as their 
time, — my facts, my net of relations, as good as theirs, 
or either of theirs. Eather let me do my work so well 
that other idlers, if they choose, may compare my 



SPIRITUAL LAWS. 129 

texture with the texture of these and find it identical 
with the best. 

This over-estimate of the possibilities of Paul and 
Pericles, this under-estimate of our own, comes from 
a neglect of the fact of an identical nature. Bona- 
parte knew but one merit, and rewarded in one and 
the same way the good soldier, the good astronomer, 
the good poet, the good player. The poet uses the 
names of Caesar, of Tamerlane, of Bonduca, of Bel- 
isarius ; the painter uses the conventional story of the 
Virgin Mary, of Paul, of Peter. He does not, there- 
fore, defer to the nature of these accidental men, of 
these stock heroes. If the poet write a true drama, 
then he is Cassar, and not the player of Caesar ; then 
the selfsame strain of thought, emotion as pure, wit as 
subtle, motions as swift, mounting, extravagant, and 
a heart as great, self-sufficing, dauntless, which on the 
waves of its love and hope can uplift all that is reck- 
oned solid and precious in the world, — palaces, gar- 
dens, money, navies, kingdoms, — marking its own 
incomparable worth by the slight it casts on these 
gauds of men, — these all are his, and by the power 
of these he rouses the nations. Let a man believe in 
God, and not in names and places and persons. Let 
the great soul incarnated in some woman's form, poor 
and sad and single, in some Dolly or Joan, go out to 
service, and sweep chambers and scour floors, and its 
effulgent daybeams cannot be muffled or hid, but to 
sweep and scour will instantly appear supreme and 
beautiful actions, the top and radiance of human life, 
and all people will get mops and brooms ; until, lo ! 
suddenly the great soul has enshrined itself in some 
9 



I30 ESSAY IV. 

other form, and done some other deed, and that is now 
the flower and head of all living nature. 

We are the photometers, we the irritable goldleaf 
and tinfoil that measure the accumulations of the sub- 
tle element. We know the authentic eiFects of the 
true fire through every one of its million disguises. 



LOVE 



" I was as a gem concealed 5 
Me my burning ray revealed." 

Koran, 



ESSAY V. 



LOVE 




VERY promise of the soul has innumera- 
ble fulfilments ; each of its joys ripens into 
a new want. Nature, uncontainable, flow- 
ing, forelooking, in the first sentiment of 
kindness anticipates already a benevolence which shall 
lose all particular regards in its general light. The 
introduction to this felicity is in a private and tender 
relation of one to one, which is the enchantment of 
human life ; which, like a certain divine rage and 
enthusiasm, seizes on man at one period, and works a 
revolution in his mind and body ; unites him to his 
race, pledges him to the domestic and civic relations, 
carries him with new sympathy into nature, enhances 
the power of the senses, opens the imagination, adds 
to his character heroic and sacred attributes, estab- 
shes marriage, and gives permanence to human 
society. 

The natural association of the sentiment of love 
with the heyday of the blood seems to require that, 
in order to portray it in vivid tints, which every youth 
and maid should confess to be true to their throbbing 
experience, one must not be too old. The delicious 



134 ESSAY V. 

fancies of youth reject the least savour of a mature 
philosophy, as chilling with age and pedantry their 
purple bloom. And, therefore, I know I incur the 
imputation of unnecessary hardness and stoicism from 
those who compose the Court and Parliament of 
Love. But from these formidable censors I shall 
appeal to my seniors. For it is to be considered that 
this passion of which we speak, though it begin with 
the young, yet forsakes not the old, or rather suffers 
no one who is truly its servant to grow old, but 
makes the aged participators of it not less than the 
tender maiden, though in a different and nobler sort. 
For it is a fire that, kindling its first embers in the 
narrow nook of a private bosom, caught from a wan- 
dering spark out of another private heart, glows and 
enlarges until it warms and beams upon multitudes 
of men and women, upon the universal heart of all, 
and so lights up the whole world and all nature with 
its generous flames. It matters not, therefore, whether 
we attempt to describe the passion at twenty, at thirty, 
or at eighty years. He who paints it at the first 
period will lose some of its later ; he who paints it at 
the last, some of its earlier traits. Only it is to be 
hoped that, by patience and the Muses' aid, we may 
attain to that inward view of the law which shall 
describe a truth ever young and beautiful, so central 
that it shall commend itself to the eye, at whatever 
angle beholden. 

And the first condition is, that we must leave a too 
close and lingering adherence to facts, and study the 
sentiment as it appeared in hope and not in history. 
For each man sees his own life defaced and disfigured. 



LOVE. 135 

as the life of man is not, to his imagination. Each 
man sees over his own experience a certain stain of 
error, whilst that of other men looks fair and ideal. 
Let any man go back to those delicious relations 
whfch make the beauty of his life, which have given 
him sincerest instruction and nourishment, he will 
shrink and moan. Alas ! I know not why, but infi- 
nite compunctions embitter in mature life the remem- 
brances of budding joy, and cover every beloved name. 
Every thing is beautiful seen from the point of the 
intellect, or as truth. But all is sour, if seen as expe- 
rience. Details are melancholy; the plan is seemly 
and noble. In the actual world — the painful king- 
dom of time and place — dwell care, and canker, and 
fear. With thought, with the ideal, is immortal hi- 
larity, the rose of joy. Round it all the Muses sing. 
But grief cleaves to names, and persons, and the par- 
tial interests of to-day and yesterday. 

The strong bent of nature is seen in the proportion 
which this topic of personal relations usurps in the 
conversation of society. What do we wish to know 
of any worthy person so much as how he has sped in 
the history of this sentiment 1 What books in the 
circulating libraries circulate? How we glow over 
these novels of passion, when the story is told with 
any spark of truth and nature ! And what fastens 
attention, in the intercourse of life, like any passage 
betraying affection between two parties ? Perhaps we 
never saw them before, and never shall meet them 
again. But we see them exchange a glance, or betray 
a deep emotion, and we are no longer strangers. We 
understand them, and take the warmest interest in the 



136 ESSAY V. 

development of the romance. All mankind love a 
lover. The earliest demonstrations of complacency 
and kindness are nature's most winning pictures. It is 
the dawn of civility and grace in the coarse and rustic. 
The rude village boy teases the girls about the school- 
house door ; — but to-day he comes running into the 
entry, and meets one fair child disposing her satchel ; 
he holds her books to help her, and instantly it seems 
to him as if she removed herself from him infinitely, 
and was a sacred precinct. Among the throng of 
girls he runs rudely enough, but one alone distances 
him ; and these two little neighbors, that were so close 
just now, have learned to respect each other's person- 
ality. Or who can avert his eyes from the engaging, 
half-artful, half-artless ways of school-girls who go 
into the country shops to buy a skein of silk or a 
sheet of paper, and talk half an hour about nothing 
with the broad-faced, good-natured shop-boy. In the 
village they are on a perfect equality, which love 
delights in, and without any coquetry the happy, 
affectionate nature of woman flows out in this pretty 
gossip. The girls may have little beauty, yet plainly 
do they establish between them and the good boy the 
most agreeable, confiding relations, what with their 
fun and their earnest, about Edgar, and Jonas, and 
Almira, and who was invited to the party, and who 
danced at the dancing-school, and when the singing- 
school would begin, and other nothings concerning 
which the parties cooed. By and by that boy wants 
a wife ; and very truly and heartily will he know 
where to find a sincere and sweet mate, without any 
risk such as Milton deplores as incident to scholars 
and great men. 



LOVE. 137 

I have been told, that in some public discourses of 
mine my reverence for the intellect has made me un- 
justly cold to the personal relations. But now I 
almost shrink at the remembrance of such disparage 
ing words. For persons are love's world, and the 
coldest philosopher cannot recount the debt of the 
young soul wandering here in nature to the power of 
love, without being tempted to unsay, as treasonable to 
nature, aught derogatory to the social instincts. For, 
though the celestial rapture falling out of heaven seizes 
only upon those of tender age, and although a beauty 
overpowering all analj-sis or comparison, and putting 
us quite beside ourselves, we can seldom see after 
thirty years, yet the remembrance of these visions out- 
lasts all other remembrances, and is a wreath of flow- 
ers on the oldest brows. But here is a strange fact ; 
it may seem to many men, in revising their experi- 
ence, that they have no fairer page in their life's book 
than the delicious memory of some passages wherein 
affection contrived to give a witchcraft surpassing the 
deep attraction of its own truth to a parcel of acci- 
dental and trivial circumstances. In looking back- 
ward, they may find that several things which were 
not the charm have more reality to this groping mem- 
ory than the charm itself which embalmed them. But 
be our experience in particulars what it may, no man 
ever forgot the visitations of that power to his heart 
and brain, which created all things new ; which was 
the dawn in him of music, poetry, and art ; which 
made the face of nature radiant with purple light, the 
morning and the night varied enchantments ; when a 
single tone of one voice could make the heart bound, 



138 ESSAY V. 

and the most trivial circumstance associated with one 
form is put in the amber of memory ; when he became 
all eye when one was present, and all memory when 
one was gone ; when the youth becomes a watcher of 
windows, and studious of a glove, a veil, a ribbon, or 
the wheels of a carriage ; when no place is too solita- 
ry, and none too silent, for him who has richer com- 
pany and sweeter conversation in his new thoughts, 
than any old friends, though best and purest, can give 
him ; for the figures, the motions, the words of the 
beloved object are not like other images written in 
water, but, as Plutarch said, " enamelled in fire," and 
make the study of midnight. 

" Thou art not gone being gone, where'er thou art, 
Thou leav'st in him thy watchful eyes, in him thy loving 
heart." 

In the noon and the afternoon of life we still throb at 
the recollection of days when happiness was not happy 
enough, but must be drugged with the relish of pain 
and fear; for he touched the secret of the matter, 
who said of love, — 

" All other pleasures are not worth its pains " *, 

and when the day was not long enough, but the night, 
too, must be consumed in keen recollections ; when 
the head boiled all night on the pillow with the gen- 
erous deed it resolved on ; when the moonlight was a 
pleasing fever, and the stars were letters, and the 
flowers ciphers, and the air was coined into song; 
when all business seemed an impertinence, and all the 
men and women running to and fro in the streets, 
mere pictures. 



LOVE. 139 

The passion rebuilds the world for the youth. It 
makes all things alive and significant. Nature grows 
conscious. Every bird on the boughs of the tree sings 
now to his heart and soul. The notes are almost 
articulate. The clouds have faces as he looks on 
them. The trees of the forest, the waving grass, and 
the peeping flowers have grown intelligent; and he 
almost fears to trust them with the secret which they 
seem to invite. Yet nature soothes and sympathizes. 
In the green solitude he finds a dearer home than 
with men. 

"Fountain-heads and pathless groves, 
Places which pale passion loves, 
Moonlight walks, when all the fowls 
Are safely housed, save bats and owls 5 
A midnight bell, a passing groan, — 
These are the sounds we feed upon." 

Behold there in the wood the fine madman ! Ho 
is a palace of sweet sounds and sights ; he dilates ; he 
is twice a man ; he walks with arms akimbo ; he solil- 
oquizes ; he accosts the grass and the trees ; he feels 
the blood of the violet, the clover, and the lily in his 
veins ; and he talks with the brook that wets his 
foot. 

The heats that have opened his perceptions of nat- 
ural beauty have made him love music and verse. It 
is a fact often observed, that men have written good 
verses under the inspiration of passion, who cannot 
write well under any other circumstances. 

The like force has the passion over all his nature. 
It expands the sentiment ; it makes the clown gentle, 
and gives the coward heart. Into the most pitiful 
and abject it will infuse a heart and courage to defy 



I40 ESSAY V. 

the world, so only it have the countenance of the be- 
loved object. In giving him to another, it still more 
gives him to himself. He is a new man, with new 
perceptions, new and keener purposes, and a religious 
solemnity of character and aims. He does not longer 
appertain to his family and society ; he is somewhat ; 
he is a person ; he is a, soul. 

And here let us examine a little nearer the nature 
of that influence which is thus potent over the human 
youth. Beauty, whose revelation to man we now 
celebrate, welcome as the sun wherever it pleases 
to shine, which pleases everybody with it and with 
themselves, seems sufficient to itself The lover can- 
not paint his maiden to his fancy poor and solitary. 
Like a tree in flower, so much soft, budding, inform- 
ing loveliness is society for itself, and she teaches his 
eye why Beauty was pictured with Loves and Graces 
attending her steps. Her existence makes the world 
rich. Though she extrudes all other persons from his 
attention as cheap and unworthy, she indemnifies him 
by carrying out her own being into somewhat imper- 
sonal, large, mundane, so that the maiden stands to 
him for a representative of all select things and vir- 
tues. For that reason, the lover never sees personal 
resemblances in his mistress to her kindred or to 
others. His friends find in her a likeness to her 
mother, or her sisters, or to persons not of her blood. 
The lover sees no resemblance except to summer 
evenings and diamond mornings, to rainbows and the 
song of birds. 

The ancients called beauty the flowering of virtue. 
Who can analyze the nameless charm which glances 



LOVE. 141 

from one and another face and form ? We are 
touched with emotions of tenderness and complacency ; 
but we cannot find whereat this dainty emotion, this 
wandering gleam, points. It is destroyed for the im- 
agination by any attempt to refer it to organization. 
Nor does it point to any relations of friendship or 
love known and described in society, but, as it seems 
to me, to a quite other and unattainable sphere, to rela- 
tions of transcendent delicacy and sweetness, to what 
roses and violets hint and foreshow. We cannot 
approach beauty. Its nature is like opaline doves'- 
neck lustres, hovering and evanescent. Herein it re- 
sembles the most excellent things, which all have this 
rainbow character, defying all attempts at appropria- 
tion and use. What else did Jean Paul Richter sig- 
nify, when he said to music, " Away ! away ! thou 
speakest to me of things which in all my endless life 
I have not found, and shall not find." The same 
fluency may be observed in every work of the plastic 
arts. The statue is then beautiful when it begins to 
be incomprehensible, when it is passing out of criti- 
cism, and can no longer be defined by compass and 
measuring-wand, but demands an active imagination 
to go with it, and to say what it is in the act of doing. 
The god or hero of the sculptor is always repre- 
sented in a transition from that which is represent- 
able to the senses to that which is not. Then first it 
ceases to be a stone. The same remark holds of 
painting. And of poetry, the success is not attained 
when it lulls and satisfies, but when it astonishes and 
fires us with new endeavors after the unattainable. 
Concerning it, Landor inquires *' whether it is not to 



142 ESSAY F. 

be referred to some purer state of sensation and exist- 
ence." 

In like manner, personal beauty is then first charm- 
ing and itself, when it dissatisfies us with any end ; 
when it becomes a story without an end ; when it sug- 
gests gleams and visions, and not earthly satisfactions ; 
when it makes the beholder feel his unworthiness ; 
when he cannot feel his right to it, though he were 
Caesar ; he cannot feel more right to it than to the 
firmament and the splendors of a sunset. 

Hence arose the saying, "If I love you, what is 
that to you ? " "We say so, because we feel that what 
we love is not in your will, but above it. It is not 
you, but your radiance. It is that which you know 
not in yourself, and can never know. 

This agrees well with that high philosophy of Beau- 
ty which the ancient writers delighted in ; for they said 
that the soul of man, embodied here on earth, went 
roaming up and down in quest of that other world of 
its own, out of which it came into this, but was soon 
stupefied by the light of the natural sun, and unable 
to see any other objects than those of this world, 
which are but shadows of real things. Therefore, the 
Deity sends the glory of youth before the soul, that it 
may avail itself of beautiful bodies as aids to its rec- 
ollection of the celestial good and fair ; and the man 
beholding such a person in the female sex runs to her, 
and finds the highest joy in contemplating the form, 
movement, and intelligence of this person, because it 
suggests to him the presence of that which indeed is 
within the beauty, and the cause of the beauty. 

If, however, from too much conversing with ma- 



LOVE. 143 

terial objects, the soul was gross, and misplaced its 
satisfaction in the body, it reaped nothing but sorrow ; 
body being unable to fulfil the promise which beauty 
holds out ; but if, accepting the hint of these visions 
and suggestions which beauty makes to his mind, the 
soul passes through the body, and falls to admire 
strokes of character, and the lovers contemplate one 
another in their discourses and their actions, then they 
pass to the true palace of beauty, more and more in- 
flame their love of it, and by this love extinguishing 
the base affection, as the sun puts out the fire by shin- 
ing on the hearth, they become pure and hallowed. 
By conversation with that which is in itself excellent, 
magnanimous, lowly, and just, the lover comes to a 
warmer love of these nobilities, and a quicker appre- 
hension of them. Then he passes from loving them 
in one to loving them in all, and so is the one beauti- 
ful soul only the door through which he enters to the 
society of all true and pure souls. In the particular 
society of his mate, he attains a clearer sight of any 
spot, any taint, which her beauty has contracted from 
this world, and is able to point it out, and this with 
mutual joy that they are now able, without offence, to 
indicate blemishes and hindrances in each other, and 
give to each all help and comfort in curing the same. 
And, beholding in many souls the traits of the divine 
beauty, and separating in each soul that which is di- 
vine from the taint which it has contracted in the 
world, the lover ascends to the highest beauty, to the 
love and knowledge of the Divinity, by steps on this 
ladder of created souls. 

Somewhat like this have the truly wise told us of 



144 ESSAY V. 

love in all ages. The doctrine is not old, nor is it 
new. If Plato, Plutarch, and Apuleius taught it, so 
have Petrarch, Angelo, and Milton. It awaits a truer 
unfolding in opposition and rebuke to that subterra- 
nean prudence which presides at marriages with words 
that take hold of the upper world, whilst one eye is 
prowling in the cellar, so that its gravest discourse 
has a savor of hams and powdering-tubs. Worst, 
when this sensualism intrudes into the education of 
young women, and withers the hope and affection of 
human nature, by teaching that marriage signifies 
nothing but a housewife's thrift, and that woman's 
life has no other aim. 

But this dream of love, though beautiful, is only 
one scene in our play. In the procession of the soul 
from within outward, it enlarges its circles ever, like 
the pebble thrown into the pond, or the light proceed- 
ing from an orb. The rays of the soul alight first 
on things nearest, on every utensil and toy, on nurses 
and domestics, on the house, and yard, and pas- 
sengers, on the circle of household acquaintance, on 
politics, and geography, and history. But things are 
ever grouping themselves according to higher or more 
interior laws. Neighborhood, size, numbers, habits, 
persons, lose by degrees their power over us. Cause 
and effect, real afiinities, the longing for harmony be- 
tween the soul and the circumstance, the progressive, 
idealizing instinct, predominate later; and the step 
backward from the higher to the lower relations is 
impossible. Thus even love, which is the deification 
of persons, must become more impersonal every day. 
Of this at first it gives no hint. Little think the 



LOVE. 145 

youth and maiden who are glancing at each other 
across crowded rooms, with eyes so full of mutual intel- 
ligence, of the precious fruit long hereafter to proceed 
from this new, quite external stimulus. The work of 
vegetation begins first in the irritability of the bark 
and leaf-buds. From exchanging glances, they ad- 
vance to acts of courtesy, of gallantry, then to fiery 
passion, to plighting troth, and marriage. Passion 
beholds its object as a perfect unit. The soul is 
wholly embodied, and the body is wholly ensouled. 

" Her pure and eloquent blood 
Spoke in her cheeks, and so distinctly wrought, 
That one might almost say her body thought. " 

Romeo, if dead, should be cut up into little stars to 
make the heavens fine. Life, with this pair, has no 
other aim, asks no more, than Juliet, — than Romeo. 
Night, day, studies, talents, kingdoms, religion, are all 
contained in this form full of soul, in this soul which 
is all form. The lovers delight in endearments, in 
avowals of love, in comparisons of their regards. 
When alone, they solace themselves with the remem- 
bered image of the other. Does that other see the 
same star, the same melting cloud, read the same 
book, feel the same emotion, that now delight me ? 
They try and weigh their affection, and, adding up 
costly advantages, friends, opportunities, properties, 
exult in discovering that willingly, joyfully, they 
would give all as a ransom for the beautiful, the be- 
loved head, not one hair of which shall be harmed. 
But the lot of humanity is on these children. Dan- 
ger, sorrow and pain arrive to them as to all. Love 
10 



146 JESSAT F. 

prays. It makes covenants with Eternal Power in 
behalf of this dear mate. The union which is thus 
effected, and which adds a new value to every atom in 
nature, for it transmutes every thread throughout the 
whole web of relation into a golden ray, and bathes 
the soul in a new and sweeter element, is yet a tem- 
porary state. Not always can flowers, pearls, poetry, 
protestations, nor even home in another heart, content 
the awful soul that dwells in clay. It arouses itself 
at last from these endearments, as toys, and puts on 
the harness, and aspires to vast and universal aims. 
The soul which is in the soul of each, craving a per- 
fect beatitude, detects incongruities, defects, and dis- 
proportion in the behavior of the other. Hence arise 
surprise, expostulation, and pain. Yet that which 
drew them to each other was signs of loveliness, signs 
of virtue ; and these virtues are there, however eclipsed. 
They appear and reappear, and continue to attract ; 
but the regard changes, quits the sign, and attaches to 
the substance. This repairs the wounded affection. 
Meantime, as life wears on, it proves a game of per- 
mutation and combination of all possible positions of 
the parties, to employ all the resources of each, and 
acquaint each with the strength and weakness of the 
other. For it is the nature and end of this relation, 
that they should represent the human race to each 
other. All that is in the world, which is or ought to 
be known, is cunningly wrought into the texture of 
man, of woman. 

*' The person love does to us fit, 

Like manna, has the taste of all in it." 

The world rolls ; the circumstances vary every 



LOVE. 147 

hour. The angels that inhabit this temple of the 
body appear at the windows, and the gnomes and 
vices also. By all the virtues they are united. If 
there be virtue, all the vices are known as such ; they 
confess and flee. Their once flaming regard is so- 
bered by time in either breast, and, losing in violence 
what it gains in extent, it becomes a thorough good 
understanding. They resign each other, without com- 
plaint, to the good offices which man and woman are 
severally appointed to discharge in time, and exchange 
the passion which once could not lose sight of its ob- 
ject, for a cheerful, disengaged furtherance, whether 
present or absent, of each other's designs. At last 
they discover that all which at first drew them to- 
gether, — those once sacred features, that magical play 
of charms, — was deciduous, had a prospective end, 
like the scaffolding by which the house was built ; and 
the purification of the intellect and the heart, from 
year to year, is the real marriage, foreseen and pre- 
pared from the first, and wholly above their conscious- 
ness. Looking at these aims with which two persons, 
a man and a woman, so variously and correlatively 
gifted, are shut up in one house to spend in the nup- 
tial society forty or fifty years, I do not wonder at 
the emphasis with which the heart prophesies this 
crisis from early infancy, at the profuse beauty with 
which the instincts deck the nuptial bower, and nature, 
and intellect, and art, emulate each other in the gifts 
and the melody they bring to the epithalamium. 

Thus are we put in training for a love which knows 
not sex, nor person, nor partiality, but which seeks 
virtue and wisdom everywhere, to the end of increas- 



148 ESSAY V, 

ing virtue and wisdom. We are by nature observers, 
and thereby learners. That is our permanent state. 
But we are often made to feel that our affections are 
but tents of a night. Though slowly and with pain, 
the objects of the affections change, as the objects of 
thought do. There are moments when the affections 
rule and absorb the man, and make his happiness de- 
pendent on a person or persons. But in health the 
mind is presently seen again, — its overarching vault, 
bright with galaxies of immutable lights, and the 
warm loves and fears that swept over us as clouds, 
must lose their finite character and blend with God, to 
attain their own perfection. But we need not fear 
that we can lose anything by the progress of the soul. 
The soul may be trusted to the end. That which is 
so beautiful and attractive as these relations must be 
succeeded and supplanted only by what is more beau- 
tiful, and so on for ever. 



FRIENDSHIP. 



A ruddy drop of manly blood 

The surging sea outweighs, 

The world uncertain comes and goes, 

The lover rooted stays. 

I fancied he was fled, 

And, after many a year, 

Glowed unexhausted kindliness 

Like daily sunrise there. 

My careful heart was free again, — 

friend, my bosom said, 

Through thee alone the sky is arched, 

Through thee the rose is red 5 

All things through thee take nobler form. 

And look beyond the earth, 

And is the mill-round of our fate 

A sun-path in thy worth. 

Me too thy nobleness has taught 

To master my despair 5 

The fountains of my hidden life 

Are through thy friendship fair. 



ESSAY VI. 



FRIENDSHIP. 




E have a great deal more kindness than is 
ever spoken. Maugre all the selfishness 
that chills like east winds the world, the 
whole human family is bathed with an ele- 
ment of love like a fine ether. How many persons 
we meet in houses, whom we scarcely speak to, whom 
yet we honor, and who honor us ! How many we see 
in the street, or sit with in church, whom, though 
silently, we warmly rejoice to be with ! Kead the 
language of these wandering eye-beams. The heart 
knoweth. 

The effect of the indulgence of this human affec- 
tion is a certain cordial exhilaration. In poetry, and 
in common speech, the emotions of benevolence and 
complacency which are felt towards others are likened 
to the material effects of fire ; so swift, or much more 
swift, more active, more cheering, are these fine in- 
ward irradiations. From the highest degree of pas- 
sionate love to the lowest degree of good-will, they 
make the sweetness of life. 

Our intellectual and active powers increase with our 
affection. The scholar sits down to write, and all his 



152 ESSAY VL 

years of meditation do not furnish him with one good 
thought or happy expression ; but it is necessary to 
write a letter to a friend, — and, forthwith, troops Of 
gentle thoughts invest themselves, on every hand, with 
chosen words. ^^See, in any house where virtue and 
self-respect abide, the palpitation which the approach 
of a stranger causes. A commended stranger is ex- 
pected and announced, and an uneasiness betwixt 
pleasure and pain invades all the hearts of a house- 
hold. His arrival almost brings fear to the good 
hearts that would welcome him. The house is dusted, 
all things fly into their places, the old coat is ex- 
changed for the new, and they must get up a dinner 
if they can. Of a commended stranger, only the good 
report is told by others, only the good and new is 
heard by us. He stands to us for humanity. He is 
what we wish. Having imagined and invested him, 
we ask how we should stand related in conversation 
and action with such a man, and are uneasy with fear. 
The same idea exalts conversation with him. We talk 
better than we are wont. We have the nimblest fancy, 
a richer memory ; and our dumb devil has taken leave 
for the time. For long hours we can continue a series 
of sincere, graceful, rich communications, drawn from 
the oldest, secretest experience, so that they who sit 
by, of our own kinsfolk and acquaintance, shall feel a 
lively surprise at our unusual powers. But as soon 
as the stranger begins to intrude his partialities, his 
definitions, his defects, into the conversation, it is all 
over. He has heard the first, the last, and best he will 
ever hear from us. He is no stranger now. Vulgar- 
ity, ignorance, misapprehension are old acquaintances. 



FRIENDSHIP. 153 

Now, when he comes, he may get the order, the dress, 
and the dinner, — but the throbbing of the heart, and 
the communications of the soul, no more.J 

What is so pleasant as these jets of affection which 
make a young world for me again ? What so de- 
licious as a just and firm encounter of two, in a 
thought, in a feeling ? How beautiful, on their ap- 
proach to this beating heart, the steps and forms of 
the gifted and the true ! The moment we indulge 
our affections, the earth is metamorphosed ; there is 
no winter and no night ; all tragedies, all ennuis, van- 
ish, — all duties even ; nothing fills the proceeding 
eternity but the forms all radiant of beloved persons. 
Let the soul be assured that somewhere in the uni- 
verse it should rejoin its friend, and it would be con- 
tent and cheerful alone for a thousand years. 

I awoke this morning with devout thanksgiving for 
my friends, the old and the new. Shall I not call 
God the Beautiful, who daily showeth himself so to 
me in his gifts ? I chide society, I embrace solitude ; 
and yet I am not so ungrateful as not to see the wise, 
the lovely, and the noble-minded, as from time to time 
they pass my gate. Who hears me, who understands 
me, becomes mine, — a possession for all time. Nor 
is nature so poor but she gives me this joy several 
times, and thus we weave social threads of our own, 
a new web of relations ; and, as many thoughts in 
succession substantiate themselves, we shall by and by 
stand in a new world of our own creation, and no 
longer strangers and pilgrims in a traditionary globe. 
My friends have come to me unsought. The great 
God gave them to me. By oldest right, by the divine 



154 i:S8AY VL 

affinity of virtue with itself, I find them, or rather not 
I, but the Deity in me and in them derides and can- 
cels the thick walls of individual character, relation, 
age, sex, circumstance, at which he usually connives, 
and now makes many one. High thanks I owe you, 
excellent lovers, who carry out the world for me to 
new and noble depths, and enlarge the meaning of all 
my thoughts. These are new poetry of the first Bard, 
— poetry without stop, — hymn, ode, and epic, poetry 
still flowing, Apollo and the Muses chanting still. 
Will these, too, separate themselves from me again, 
or some of them ? I know not, but I fear it not ; for 
my relation to them is so pure, that we hold by sim- 
ple affinity, and the Genius of my life being thus 
social, the same affinity will exert its energy on whom- 
soever is as noble as these men and women, wherever 
I may be. 

I confess to an extreme tenderness of nature on this 
point. It is almost dangerous to me to '^ crush the 
sweet poison of misused wine " of the affections. A 
new person is to me a great event, and hinders me from 
sleep. I have often had fine fancies about persons 
which have given me delicious hours ; but the joy ends 
in the day ; it yields no fruit. Thought is not born of 
it ; my action is very little modified. -I must feel pride 
in my friend's accomplishments as if tKey were mine, — 
and a property in his virtues. I feel as warmly when 
he is praised, as the lover when he hears applause of 
his engaged maiden. We over-estimate the conscience 
of our friend. His goodness seems better than our 
goodness, his nature finer, his temptations less. Every 
thing that is his, — his name, his form, his dress, books, 



FRIENDSHIP. 155 

and instruments, — fancy enhances. ur own thought 
sounds new and larger from his mouttu ? 
\. Yet the systole and diastole of the heart are not 
without their analogy in the ebb and flow of love. 
Friendship, like the immortality of the soul, is too 
good to be believed. The lover, beholding his maiden, 
half knows that she is not verily that which he wor- 
ships ; and in the golden hour of friendship, we are 
surprised with shades of suspicion and unbelief. We 
doubt that we bestow on our hero the virtues in which 
he shines, and afterwards worship the form to which 
we have ascribed this divine inhabitation. In strict- 
ness, the soul does not respect men as it respects itself. 
In strict science all persons underlie the same condition 
of an infinite remoteness. Shall we fear to cool our 
love by mining for the metaphysical foundation of this 
Elysian temple ? Shall I not be as real as the things 
I see ? If I am, I shall not fear to know them for 
what they are. Their essence is not less beautiful 
than their appearance, though it needs finer organs for 
its apprehension. The root of the plant is not un- 
sightly to science, though for chaplets and festoons we 
cut the stem short. And I must hazard the production 
of the bald fact amidst these pleasing reveries, though 
it should prove an Egyptian skull at our banquet. A 
man who stands united with his thought conceives 
magnificently of himself. He is conscious of a univer- 
sal success, even though bought by uniform particular 
failures. No advantages, no powers, no gold or force, 
can be any match for him. I cannot choose but rely 
on my own poverty more than on your wealth. I can- 
not make your consciousness tantamount to mine. 



156 ESSAY VL 

Only the star dazzles ; the planet has a faint, moon- 
like ray. I hear what you say of the admirable parts 
and tried temper of the party you praise, but I see 
well that for all his purple cloaks I shall not like him, 
unless he is at last a poor Greek like me. I cannot 
deny it, O friend, that the vast shadow of the Phenom- 
enal includes thee also in its pied and painted immen- 
sity, — thee, also, compared with whom all else is 
shadow. Thou art not Being, as Truth is, as Justice 
is, — thou art not my soul, but a picture and ef^gj of 
that. Thou hast come to me lately, and already thou 
art seizing thy hat and cloak. Is it not that the soul 
puts forth friends as the tree puts forth leaves, and 
presently, by the germination of new buds, extrudes 
the old leaf? The law of nature is alternation for 
evermore. Each electrical state superinduces the oppo- 
site. The soul environs itself with friends, that it may 
enter into a grander self-acquaintance or solitude ; and 
it goes alone for a season, that it may exalt its con- 
versation or society. This method betrays itself along 
the whole history of our personal relations. The in- 
stinct of affection revives the hope of union with our 
mates, and the returning sense of insulation recalls us 
from the chase. Thus every man passes his life in 
the search after friendship ; and if he should record his 
true sentiment, he might write a letter like this to 
each new candidate for his love. 

Dear Friend : — 

If I was sure of thee, sure of thy capacity, sure to 
match my mood with thine, I should never think 
again of trifles in relation to thy comings and goings. 



FRIENDSHIP. 157 

I am not very wise ; my moods are quite attainable ; 
and I respect thy genius ; it is to me as yet unfath- 
omed ; yet dare I not presume in thee a perfect intel- 
ligence of me, and so thou art to me a delicious tor- 
ment. Thine ever, or never. 

Yet these uneasy pleasures and fine pains are for 
curiosity, and not for life. They are not to be 
indulged. This is to weave cobweb, and not cloth. 
Our friendships hurry to short and poor conclusions, 
because we have made them a texture of wine and 
dreams, instead of the tough fibre of the human heart. 
The laws of friendship are austere and eternal, of one 
web with the laws of nature and of morals. But we 
have aimed at a swift and petty benefit, to suck a 
sudden sweetness We snatch at the slowest fruit in 
the whole garden of God, which many summers and 
many winters must ripen. We seek our friend not 
sacredly, but with an adulterate passion which would 
appropriate him to ourselves. In vain. We are 
armed all over with subtle antagonisms, which, as 
soon as we meet, begin to play, and translate all 
poetry into stale prose. Almost all people descend to 
meet. All association must be a compromise, and, 
what is worst, the very flower and aroma of the flower 
of each of the beautiful natures disappears as they 
approach each other. What a perpetual disappoint- 
ment is actual society, even of the virtuous and gifted ! 
After interviews have been compassed with long fore- 
sight, we must be tormented presently by baflied 
blows, by sudden, unseasonable apathies, by epilep- 
sies of wit and of animal spirits, in the heyday of 



158 ESSAY VL 

friendship and thought. Our faculties do not play us 
true, and both parties are relieved by solitude. 

I ought to be equal to every relation. It makes no 
difference how many friends I have, and what content 
I can find in conversing with each, if there be one to 
whom I am not equal. If I have shrunk unequal from 
one contest, the joy I find in all the rest becomes 
mean and cowardly. I should hate myself, if then I 
made my other friends my asylum. 

" The valiant warrior famoused for fight, 
After a hundred victories, once foiled, 
Is from the book of honor razed quite, 
And all the rest forgot for which he toiled." 

Our impatience is thus sharply rebuked. Bashful- 
ness and apathy are a tough husk, in which a delicate 
organization is protected from premature ripening. 
It would be lost if it knew itself before any of the best 
souls were yet ripe enough to know and own it. Re- 
spect the naturlangsamkeit which hardens the ruby in a 
million years, and works in duration, in which Alps 
and Andes come and go as rainbows. The good 
spirit of our life has no heaven which is the price of 
rashness. Love, which is the essence of God, is not 
for levity, but for the total worth of man. Let us not 
have this childish luxury in our regards, but the aus- 
terest worth ; let us approach our friend with an 
audacious trust in the truth of his heart, in the 
breadth, impossible to be overturned, of his founda- 
tions. 

The attractions of this subject are not to be resisted ; 
and I leave, for the time, all account of subordinate 
social benefit, to speak of that select and sacred rela- 



FRIENDSHIP, 159 

tion which is a kind of absolute, and which even leaves 
the language of love suspicious and common, so much 
is this purer, and nothing is so much divine. 

I do not wish to treat friendships daintily, but with 
roughest courage. When they are real, they are not 
glass threads or frostwork, but the solidest thing we 
know. For now, after so many ages of experience, 
what do we know of nature, or of ourselves ? Not 
one step has man taken toward the solution of the 
problem of his destiny. In one condemnation of 
folly stand the whole universe of men. But the 
sweet sincerity ot joy and peace, which I draw from 
this alliance with my brother's soul, is the nut itself, 
whereof all nature and all thought is but the husk and 
shell. Happy is the house that shelters a friend ! It 
might well be built, like a festal bower or arch, to 
entertain him a single day. Happier, if he know 
the solemnity of that relation, and honor its law! 
He who offers himself a candidate for that covenant 
comes up, like an Olympian, to the great games, 
where the first-born of the world are the competitors. 
He proposes himself for contests where Time, Want, 
Danger, are in the lists ; and he alone is victor who 
has truth enough in his constitution to preserve the 
delicacy of his beauty from the wear and tear of all 
these. The gifts of fortune may be present or absent, 
but all the speed in that contest depends on intrinsic 
nobleness, and the contempt of trifles. There are two 
elements that go to the composition of friendship, 
each so sovereign that I can detect no superiority in 
either, no reason why either should be first named. 
One is Truth. A friend is a person with whom I 



i6o USSAY VL 

may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud. I 
am arrived at last in the presence of a man so real 
and equal, that I may drop even those undermost gar- 
ments of dissimulation, courtesy, and second thought, 
which men never put off, and may deal with him with 
the simplicity and wholeness with which one chem- 
ical atom meets another. Sincerity is the luxury 
allowed, like diadems and authority, only to the high- 
est rank, that being permitted to speak truth, as having 
none above it to court or conform unto. Every man 
alone is sincere. At the entrance of a second person, 
hypocrisy begins. We parry and fend the approach 
of our fellow-man by compliments, by gossip, by 
amusements, by affairs. We cover up our thought 
from him under a hundred folds. I knew a man, who, 
under a certain religious frenzy, cast off this drapery, 
and, omitting all compliment and commonplace, spoke 
to the conscience of every person he encountered, and 
that with great insight and beauty. At first he was 
resisted, and all men agreed he was mad. But per- 
sisting, as indeed he could not help doing, for some 
time in this course, he attained to the advantage of 
bringing every man of his acquaintance into true rela- 
tions with him. No man would think of speaking 
falsely with him, or of putting him off with any chat 
of markets or reading-rooms. But every man was con- 
strained by so much sincerity to the like plain dealing, 
and what love of nature, what poetry, what symbol of 
truth he had, he did certainly show him. But to 
most of us society shows not its face and eye, but its 
side and its back. To stand in true relations with 
men in a false age is worth a fit of insanity, is it not 1 



FRIENDSHIP. i6i 

We can seldom go erect. Almost every man we meet 
requires some civility, requires to be humored; he 
has some fame, some talent, some whim of religion or 
philanthropy in his head that is not to be questioned, 
and which spoils all conversation with him. But a 
friend is a sane man who exercises not my ingenuity 
but me. My friend gives me entertainment, without 
requiring any stipulation on my part. A friend there- 
fore is a sort of paradox in nature. I who alone am, 
I who see nothing in nature whose existence I can 
affirm with equal evidence to my own, behold now the 
semblance of my being, in all its height, variety, and 
curiosity, reiterated in a foreign form ; so that a friend 
may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature. 

The other element of friendship is tenderness. We 
are holden to men by every sort of tie, by blood, by 
pride, by fear, by hope, by lucre, by lust, by hate, by 
admiration, by every circumstance and badge and tri- 
fle, but we can scarce believe that so much character 
can subsist in another as to draw us by love. Can 
another be so blessed, and we so pure, that we can 
offer him tenderness ? When a man becomes dear to 
me, I have touched the goal of fortune. I find very 
little written directly to the heart of this matter in 
books. And yet I have one text which I cannot 
choose but remember. My author says, " I ofier 
myself faintly and bluntly to those whose I effectually 
am, and tender myself least to him to whom I am the 
most devoted." I wish that friendship should have 
feet, as well as eyes and eloquence. It must plant 
itself on the ground, before it vaults over the moon. 
I wish it to be a little of a citizen before it is quite a 
II 



1 62 -ESSAY VL 

cherub. We chide the citizen because he makes love 
a commodity. It is an exchange of gifts, of useful 
loans ; it is good neighborhood ; it watches with the 
sick ; it holds the pall at the funeral, and quite loses 
sight of the delicacies and nobility of the relation. 
But though we cannot find the god under this dis- 
guise of a sutler, yet, on the other hand, we cannot 
forgive the poet if he spins his thread too fine, and 
does not substantiate his romance by the municipal 
virtues of justice, punctuality, fidelity, and pity. I 
hate the prostitution of the name of friendship to sig- 
nify modish and worldly alliances. I much prefer the 
company of ploughboys and tin-pedlers to the silken 
and perfumed amity which celebrates its days of 
encounter by a frivolous display, by rides in a curri- 
cle, and dinners at the best taverns. The end of 
friendship is a commerce the most strict and homely 
that can be joined ; more strict than any of which we 
have experience. It is for aid and comfort through 
all the relations and passages of life and death. It is 
fit for serene days, and graceful gifts, and country 
rambles, but also for rough roads and hard fare, ship- 
wreck, poverty, and persecution. It keeps company 
with the sallies of the wit and the trances of religion. 
We are to dignify to each other the daily needs and 
offices of man's life, and embellish it by courage, wis- 
dom, and unity. It should never fall into something 
usual and settled, but should be alert and inventive, 
and add rhyme and reason to what was drudgery. 

Friendship may be said to require natures so rare and 
costly, each so well tempered and so happily adapted, 
and withal so circumstanced (for even in that par- 



FRIENDSHIP. 163 

ticular, a poet says, love demands that the parties be 
altogether paired), that its satisfaction can very sel- 
dom be assured. It cannot subsist in its perfection, 
say some of those who are learned in this warm lore 
of the heart, betwixt more than two. I am not quite 
so strict in my terms, perhaps because I have never 
known so high a fellowship as others. I please my 
imagination more with a circle of godlike men and 
women variously related to each other, and between 
whom subsists a lofty intelligence. But I find this 
law of one to one peremptory for conversation, which is 
the practice and consummation of friendship. Do not 
mix waters too much. The best mix as ill as good 
and bad. You shall have very useful and cheering 
discourse at several times with two several men, but 
let all three of you come together, and you shall not 
have one new and hearty word. Two may talk and 
one may hear, but three cannot take part in a conver- 
sation of the most sincere and searching sort. In 
good company there is never such discourse between 
two, across the table, as takes place when you leave 
them alone. In good company, the individuals merge 
their egotism into a social soul exactly coextensive 
with the several consciousnesses there present. No 
partialities of friend to friend, no fondnesses of brother 
to sister, of wife to husband, are there pertinent, but 
quite otherwise. Only he may then speak who can 
sail on the common thought of the party, and not 
poorly limited to his own. Now this convention, 
which good sense demands, destroys the high freedom 
of great conversation, which requires an absolute run- 
ning of two souls into one. 



1 64 ESSAY VL 

No two men but, being left alone with each other, 
enter into simpler relations. Yet it is affinity that 
determines which two shall converse. Unrelated men 
give little joy to each other, will never suspect the 
latent powers of each. We talk sometimes of a great 
talent for conversation, as if it were a permanent prop- 
erty in some individuals. Conversation is an evanes- 
cent relation, — no more. A man is reputed to have 
thought and eloquence ; he cannot, for all that, say a 
word to his cousin or his uncle. They accuse his 
silence with as much reason as they would blame the 
insignificance of a dial in the shade. In the sun it 
will mark the hour. Among those who enjoy his 
thought, he will regain his tongue. 

Friendship requires that rare mean betwixt likeness 
and unlikeness, that piques each with the presence of 
power and of consent in the other party. Let me be 
alone to the end of the world, rather than that my 
friend should overstep, by a word or a look, his real 
sympathy. I am equally balked by antagonism and 
by compliance. Let him not cease an instant to be 
himself. The only joy I have in his being mine, is 
that the not mine is mine. I hate, where I looked for 
a manly furtherance, or at least a manly resistance, to 
find a mush of concession. Better be a nettle in the 
side of your friend than his echo. The condition 
which high friendship demands is ability to do with- 
out it. That high office requires great and sublime 
parts. There must be very two, before there can 
be very one. Let it be an alliance of two large, for- 
midable natures, mutually beheld, mutually feared, 
before yet they recognize the deep identity which be- 
neath these disparities unites them. 



FRIENDSHIP, 165 

He only is fit for this society who is magnanimous ; 
who is sure that greatness and goodness are always 
economy; who is not swift to intermeddle with his 
fortunes. Let him not intermeddle with this. Leave 
to the diamond its ages to grow, nor expect to accel- 
erate the births of the eternal. Friendship demands a 
religious treatment. We talk of choosing our friends, 
but friends are self-elected. Keverence is a great part 
of it. Treat your friend as a spectacle. Of course he 
has merits that are not yours, and that you cannot 
honor, if you must needs hold him close to your per- 
son. Stand aside ; give those merits room ; let them 
mount and expand. Are you the friend of your 
friend's buttons, or of his thought ? To a great heart 
he will still be a stranger in a thousand particulars, 
that he may come near in the holiest ground. Leave 
it to girls and boys to regard a friend as property, and 
to suck a short and all-confounding pleasure, instead 
of the noblest benefit. 

Let us buy our entrance to this guild by a long pro- 
bation. Why should we desecrate noble and beautiful 
souls by intruding on them ? Why insist on rash 
personal relations with your friend ? Why go to his 
house, or know his mother and brother and sisters ? 
Why be visited by him at your own ? Are these 
things material to our covenant ? Leave this touching 
and clawing. Let him be to me a spirit. A message, 
a thought, a sincerity, a glance from him, I want, but 
not news nor pottage. I can get politics, and chat, 
and neighborly conveniences from cheaper companions. 
Should not the society of my friend be to me poetic, 
pure, universal, and great as nature itself? Ought I 



1 66 JESS AY VI. 

to feel that our tie is profane in comparison with yon- 
der bar of cloud that sleeps on the horizon, or that 
clump of waving grass that divides the brook 1 Let 
us not vilify, but raise it to that standard. That 
great, defying eye, that scornful beauty of his mien and 
action, do not pique yourself on reducing, but rather 
fortify and enhance. Worship his superiorities ; wish 
him not less by a thought, but hoard and tell them all. 
Guard him as thy counterpart. Let him be to thee 
for ever a sort of beautiful enemy, untamable, devoutly 
revered, and not a trivial conveniency to be soon out- 
grown and cast aside. The hues of the opal, the light 
of the diamond, are not to be seen, if the eye is too 
near. To my friend I write a letter, and from him I 
receive a letter. That seems to you a little. It suf- 
fices me. It is a spiritual gift worthy of him to give, 
and of me to receive. It profanes nobody. In these 
warm lines the heart will trust itself, as it will not to the 
tongue, and pour out the prophecy of a godlier exist- 
ence than all the annals of heroism have yet made good. 
Kespect so far the holy laws of this fellowship as not 
to prejudice its perfect flower by your impatience for 
its opening. We must be our own before we can be 
another's. There is at least this satisfaction in crime, 
according to the Latin proverb ; — you can speak to 
your accomplice on even terms. Crimen quos inquinat, 
cequat. To those whom we admire and love, at first 
we cannot. Yet the least defect of self-possession viti- 
ates, in my judgment, the entire relation. There can 
never be deep peace between two spirits, never mutual 
respect, until, in their dialogue, each stands for the 
whole world. 



FRIENDSHIP, 167 

What is so great as friendship, let us carry with 
what grandeur of spirit we can. Let us be silent, — 
so we may hear the wliisper of the gods. Let us not 
interfere. Who set you to cast about what you should 
say to the select souls, or how to say anything to 
such ? No matter how ingenious, no matter how grace- 
ful and bland. There are innumerable degrees of fol- 
ly and wisdom, and for you to say aught is to be 
frivolous. Wait, and thy heart shall speak. Wait 
until the necessary and everlasting overpowers you, 
until day and night avail themselves of your lips. 

The only reward of virtue is virtue ; the only way 
to have a friend is to be one. You shall not come 
nearer a man by getting into his house. If unlike, 
his soul only flees the faster from you, and you shall 
never catch a true glance of his eye. We see the 
noble afar off, and they repel us ; why should we 
intrude ? Late, — very late, — we perceive that no 
arrangements, no introductions, no consuetudes or 
habits of society, would be of any avail to establish us 
in such relations with them as we desire, — but solely 
the uprise of nature in us to the same degree it is in 
them; then shall we meet as water with water; and 
if we should not meet them then, we shall not want 
them, for we are already they. In the last analysis, 
love is only the reflection of a man's own worthiness 
from other men. Men have sometimes exchanged 
names with their friends, as if they would signify that 
in their friend each loved his own soul. 

The higher the style we demand of friendship, of 
course the less easy to establish it with flesh and blood. 
We walk alone in the world. Friends, such as we 



1 68 ESSAY VL 

desire, are dreams and fables. But a sublime hope 
cheers ever the faithful heart, that elsewhere, in other 
regions of the universal power, souls are now acting, 
enduring, and daring, which can love us, and which 
we can love. We may congratulate ourselves that the 
period of nonage, of follies, of blunders, and of shame, 
is passed in solitude, and when we are finished men, 
we shall grasp heroic hands in heroic hands. Only 
be admonished by what you already see, not to strike 
leagues of friendship with cheap persons, where no 
friendship can be. Our impatience betrays us into 
rash and foolish alliances which no God attends. By 
persisting in your path, though you forfeit the little 
you gain the great. You demonstrate yourself, so as 
to put yourself out of the reach of false relations, and 
you draw to you the first-bom of the world, — those 
rare pilgrims whereof only one or two wander in na- 
ture at once, and before whom the vulgar great show 
as spectres and shadows merely. 

It is foolish to be afraid of making our ties too 
spiritual, as if so we could lose any genuine love. 
Whatever correction of our popular views we make 
from insight, nature will be sure to bear us out in, 
and though it seem to rob us of some joy, will repay 
us with a greater. Let us feel, if we will, the abso- 
lute insulation of man. We are sure that we have all 
in us. We go to Europe, or we pursue persons, or 
we read books, in the instinctive faith that these will 
call it out and reveal us to ourselves. Beggars all. 
The persons are such as we ; the Europe, an old faded 
garment of dead persons; the books, their ghosts. 
Let us drop this idolatry. Let us give over this men- 



FRIENDSHIP. 169 

dicancy. Let us even bid our dearest friends farewell, 
and defy them, saying, " Who are you ? Unhand 
me : I will be dependent no more/* Ah ! seest thou 
not, O brother, that thus we part only to meet again 
on a higher platform, and only be more each other's, 
because we are more our own ? A friend is Janus- 
faced : he looks to the past and the future. He is the 
child of all my foregoing hours, the prophet of those 
to come, and the harbinger of a greater friend. 

I do then with my friends as I do with my books. 
I would have them where I can find them, but I sel- 
dom use them. We must have society on our own 
terms, and admit or exclude it on the slightest cause. 
I cannot afford to speak much with my friend. If he 
is great, he makes me so great that I cannot descend 
to converse. In the great days, presentiments hover 
before me in the firmament. I ought then to dedicate 
myself to them. I go in that I may seize them, I go 
out that I may seize them. I fear only that I may 
lose them receding into the sky in which now they are 
only a patch of brighter light. Then, though I prize 
my friends, I cannot afford to talk with them and 
study their visions, lest I lose my own. It would in- 
deed give me a certain household joy to quit this lofty 
seeking, this spiritual astronomy, or search of stars, 
and come down to warm sympathies with you ; but 
then I know well I shall mourn always the vanishing 
of my mighty gods. It is true, next week I shall 
have languid moods, when I can well afford to occupy 
myself with foreign objects ; then I shall regret the 
lost literature of your mind, and wish you were by my 
side again. But if you come, perhaps you will fill 



170 JESSAY VI. 

my mind only with new visions, not with yourself but 
with your lustres, and I shall not be able any more 
than now to converse with you. So I will owe to my 
friends this evanescent intercourse. I will receive 
from them, not what they have, but what they are. 
They shall give me that which properly they cannot 
give, but which emanates from them. But they shall 
not hold me by any relations less subtile and pure. 
We will meet as though we met not, and part as 
though we parted not. 

It has seemed to me lately more possible than I 
knew to carry a friendship greatly, on one side, with- 
out due correspondence on the other. Why should I 
cumber myself with regrets that the receiver is not 
capacious ? It never troubles the sun that some of 
his rays fall wide and vain into ungrateful space, and 
only a small part on the reflecting planet. Let your 
greatness educate the crude and cold companion. If 
he is unequal, he will presently pass away ; but thou 
art enlarged by thy own shining, and, no longer a 
mate for frogs and worms, dost soar and burn with 
the gods of the empyrean. It is thought a disgrace 
to love unrequited. But the great will see that true 
love cannot be unrequited. True love transcends the 
unworthy object, and dwells and broods on the eter- 
nal ; and when the poor interposed mask crumbles, it 
is not sad, but feels rid of so much earth, and feels its 
independency the surer. Yet these things may hardly 
be said without a sort of treachery to the relation. 
The essence of friendship is entireness, a total mag- 
nanimity and trust. It must not surmise or provide 
for infirmity. It treats its object as a god, that it 
may deify both. 



PEUDENCE. 



Theme no poet gladly sung, 
Fair to old and foul to young, 
Scorn not thou the love of parts, 
And the articles of arts. 
Grandeur of the perfect sphere 
Thanks the atoms that cohere. 



ESSAY vn. 



PRUDENCE, 




HAT right have I to write on Prudence, 
whereof I have little, and that of the nega- 
tive sort ? My prudence consists in avoid- 
ing and going without, not in the inventing 
of means and methods, not in adroit steering, not in 
gentle repairing. I have no skill to make money 
spend well, no genius in my economy ; and whoever 
sees my garden discovers that I must have some 
other garden. Yet I love facts, and hate lubricity, 
and people without perception. Then I have the 
same title to write on prudence that I have to write 
on poetry or holiness. We write from aspiration and 
antagonism, as well as from experience. We paint 
those qualities which we do not possess. The poet 
admires the man of energy and tactics ; the merchant 
breeds his son for the church or the bar : and where 
a man is not vain and egotistic, you shall find what 
he has not by his praise. Moreover, it would be 
hardly honest in me not to balance these fine lyric 
words of Love and Friendship with words of coarser 
sound, and, whilst my debt to my senses is real and 
constant, not to own it in passing. 



174 ESSAY VIL 

Prudence is the virtue of the senses. It is the 
science of appearances. It is the outmost action of 
the inward life. It is God taking thought for oxen. 
It moves matter after the laws of matter. It is con- 
tent to seek health of body by complying with physical 
conditions, and health of mind by the laws of the in- 
tellect. 

The world of the senses is a world of shows. It 
does not exist for itself, but has a symbolic character y 
and a true prudence or law of shows recognizes the 
co-presence of other laws, and knows that its own 
office is subaltern ; knows that it is surface and not 
centre where it works. Prudence is false when de- 
tached. It is legitimate when it is the Natural His- 
tory of the soul incarnate ; when it unfolds the beauty 
of laws within the narrow scope of the senses. 

There are all degrees of proficiency in knowledge 
of the world. It is sufficient, to our present purpose 
to indicate three. One class live to the utility of the 
symbol; esteeming health and wealth a final good. 
Another class live above this mark to the beauty of 
the symbol ; as the poet, and artist, and the natur- 
alist, and man of science. A third class live above 
the beauty of the symbol to the beauty of the thing 
signified ; these are wise men. The first class have 
common sense; the second, taste; and the third, 
spiritual perception. Once in a long time, a man 
traverses the whole scale, and sees and enjoys the 
symbol solidly; then also has a clear eye for its 
beauty ; and lastly, whilst he pitches his tent on this 
sacred volcanic isle of nature, does not offer to build 
houses and barns thereon, reverencing the splendor of 



PRUDENCE, 175 

the God which he sees bursting through each chink 
and cranny. 

The world is filled with the proverbs and acts and 
winkings of a base prudence, which is a devotion to 
matter, as if we possessed no other faculties than the 
palate, the nose, the touch, the eye and ear; a pru- 
dence which adores the Kule of Three, which never 
subscribes, which never gives, which seldom lends, 
and asks but one question of any project. Will it 
bake bread 1 This is a disease like a thickening of 
the skin until the vital organs are destroyed. But 
culture, revealing the high origin of the apparent 
world, and aiming at the perfection of the man as the 
end, degrades everything else, as health and bodily 
life, into means. It sees prudence not to be a several 
faculty, but a name for wisdom and virtue conversing 
with the body and its wants. Cultivated men always 
feel and speak so, as if a great fortune, the achieve- 
ment of a civil or social measure, great personal influ- 
ence, a graceful and commanding address, had their 
value as proofs of the energy of the spirit. If a man 
lose his balance, and immerse himself in any trades or 
pleasures for their own sake, he may be a good wheel 
or pin, but he is not a cultivated man. 

The spurious prudence, making the senses final, is 
the god of sots and cowards, and is the subject of all 
comedy. It is nature's joke, and therefore literature's. 
The true prudence limits this sensualism by admitting 
the knowledge of an internal and real world. This 
recognition once made, the order of the world and 
the distribution of affairs and times being studied with 
the co-perception of their subordinate place, will re- 



176 ESSAY VIL 

ward any degree of attention. For our existence, 
thus apparently attached in nature to the sun and the 
returning moon and the periods which they mark, — 
so susceptible to climate and to country, so alive to 
social good and evil, so fond of splendor, and so ten- 
der to hunger and cold and debt, — reads all its pri- 
mary lessons out of these books. 

Prudence does not go behind nature, and ask 
whence it is. It takes the laws of the world, where- 
by man's being is conditioned, as they are, and keeps 
these laws, that it may enjoy their proper good. It 
respects space and time, climate, want, sleep, the law 
of polarity, growth, and death. There revolve, to give 
bound and period to his being, on all sides, the sun 
and moon, the great formalists in the sky : here lies 
stubborn matter, and will not swerve from its chem- 
ical routine. Here is a planted globe, pierced and 
belted with natural laws, and fenced and distributed 
externally with civil partitions and properties which 
impose new restraints on the young inhabitant. 

We eat of the bread which grows in the field. We 
live by the air which blows around us, and we are 
poisoned by the air that is too cold or too hot, too dry 
or too wet. Time, which shows so vacant, indivisible, 
and divine in its coming, is slit and peddled into trifles 
and tatters. A door is to be painted, a lock to be re- 
paired. I want wood, or oil, or meal, or salt ; the 
house smokes, or I have a headache ; then the tax ; 
and an affair to be transacted with a man without 
heart or brains ; and the stinging recollection of an 
injurious or very awkward word, — these eat up the 
hours. Do what we can, summer will have its flies ; 



PRUDENCE, 177 

if we walk in the woods, we must feed mosquitos ; if 
we go a-fisbing, we must expect a wet coat. Then 
cHmate is a great impediment to idle persons : we 
often resolve to give up the care of the weather, but 
still we regard the clouds and the rain. 

"We are instructed by these petty experiences which 
usurp the hours and years. The hard soil and four 
months of snow make the inhabitant of the northern 
temperate zone wiser and abler thaji his fellow who 
enjoys the fixed smile of the tropics. The islander 
may ramble all day at will. At night, he may sleep 
on a mat under the moon ; and wherever a wild date- 
tree grows, nature has, without a prayer even, spread 
a table for his morning meal. The northerner is per- 
force a householder. He must brew, bake, salt, and 
preserve his food, and pile wood andxoal. But as it 
happens that not one stroke can labor lay to, without 
some new acquaintance with nature ; and as nature is 
inexhaustibly significant, the inhabitants of these cli- 
mates have always excelled the southerner in force. 
Such is the value of these matters, that a man who 
knows other things can never know too much of these. 
Let him have accurate perceptions. Let him, if he 
have hands, handle ; if eyes, measure and discriminate ; 
let him accept and hive every fact of chemistry, nat- 
ural history, and economics ; the more he has, the less 
is he willing to spare any one. Time is always bring- 
ing the occasions that disclose their value. Some 
wisdom comes out of every natural and innocent ac- 
tion. The domestic man, who loves no music so well 
as his kitchen clock, and the airs which the logs sing 
to him as they burn on the hearth, has solaces which 



178 ESSAY VII. 

others never dream of. The application of means to 
ends insures victory and the songs of victory, not less 
in a farm or a shop than in the tactics of party or of 
vrar. The good husband finds method as efficient in 
the packing of firewood in a shed, or in the harvest- 
ing of fruits in the cellar, as in Peninsular campaigns 
or the files of the Department of State. In the rainy 
day, he builds a work-bench, or gets his tool-box set 
in the corner of the barn-chamber, and stored with 
nails, gimlet, pincers, screwdriver, and chisel. Herein 
he tastes an old joy of youth and childhood, the cat- 
like love of garrets, presses, and corn-chambers, and 
of the conveniences of long housekeeping. His gar- 
den or his poultry-yard tells him many pleasant anec- 
dotes. One might find argument for optimism in the 
abundant flow of this saccharine element of pleasure 
in every suburb and extremity of the good world. 
Let a man keep the law, — any law, — and his way 
vrill be strown with satisfactions. There is more dif- 
ference in the quality of our pleasures than in the 
amount. 

On the other hand, nature punishes any neglect of 
prudence. If you think the senses final, obey their 
law. If you believe in the soul, do not clutch at sen- 
sual sweetness before it is ripe on the slow tree of 
cause and eficct. It is vinegar to the eyes, to deal 
with men of loose and imperfect perception. Dr. 
Johnson is reported to have said, " If the child says 
he looked out of this window when he looked out 
of that, whip him.'^ Our American character is 
marked by a more than average delight in accurate 
perception, which is shown by the currency of the by- 



^PRUDENCE. 179 

word, "No mistake." But the discomfort of un- 
punctuality, of confusion of thought about facts, of 
inattention to the wants of to-morrow, is of no nation. 
The beautiful laws of time and space, once dislocated 
by our inaptitude, are holes and dens. If the hive 
be disturbed by rash and stupid hands, instead of 
honey, it will yield us bees. Our words and actions 
to be fair must be timely. A gay and pleasant sound 
is the whetting of the scythe in the mornings of 
June ; yet what is more lonesome and sad than the 
sound of a whetstone or mower's rifle, when it is 
too late in the season to make hay ? Scatter-brained 
and " afternoon men " spoil much more than their 
own affair, in spoiling the temper of those who deal 
with them. I have seen a criticism on some paint- 
ings, of which I am reminded when I see the shiftless 
and unhappy men who are not true to their senses. 
The last Grand Duke of Weimar, a man of superior 
understanding, said : "I have sometimes remarked 
in the presence of great works of art, and just now 
especially in Dresden, how much a certain property 
contributes to the effect which gives life to the figures, 
and to the life an irresistible truth. This property is 
the hitting, in all the figures we draw, the right centre 
of gravity. I mean, the placing the figures firm upon 
their feet, mating the hands grasp, and fastening the 
eyes on the spot where they should look. Even life- 
less figures, as vessels and stools, — let them be drawn 
ever so correctly, — lose all effect so soon as they lack 
the resting upon their centre of gravity, and have a 
certain swimming and oscillating appearance. The 
Raphael, in the Dresden gallery (the only greatly 



i8o JESS AY VIL 

affecting picture which I have seen), is the quietest 
and most passionless piece you can imagine ; a couple 
of saints who worship the Virgin and child. Never- 
theless, it awakens a deeper impression than the con- 
tortions of ten crucified martyrs. For, beside all the 
resistless beauty of form, it possesses in the highest 
degree the property of the perpendicularity of all the 
figures." This perpendicularity we demand of all the 
figures in this picture of life. Let them stand on 
their feet, and not float and swing. Let us know 
where to find them. Let them discriminate between 
what they remember and what they dreamed, call a 
spade a spade, give us facts, and honor their own 
senses with trust. 

But what man shall dare tax another with impru- 
dence ? Who is prudent ? The men we call greatest 
are least in this kingdom. There is a certain fatal 
dislocation in our relation to nature, distorting our 
modes of living, and making every law our enemy, 
which seems at last to have aroused all the wit and 
virtue in the world to ponder the question of Reform. 
We must call the highest prudence to counsel, and 
ask why health and beauty and genius should now be 
the exception, rather than the rule, of human nature. 
We do not know the properties of plants and animals 
and the laws of nature through our sympathy with the 
same ; but this remains the dream of poets. Poetry 
and prudence should be coincident. Poets should be 
lawgivers ; that is, the boldest lyric inspiration should 
not chide and insult, but should announce and lead, 
the civil code, and the day's work. But now the two 
things seem irreconcilably parted. We have violated 



PRUDENCE. i8i 

law upon law, until we stand amidst ruins ; and when 
by chance we espy a coincidence between reason and the 
phenomena, we are surprised. Beauty should be the 
dowry of every man and woman, as invariably as sen- 
sation ; but it is rare. Health or sound organization 
should be universal. Genius should be the child of 
genius, and every child should be inspired ; but now 
it is not to be predicted of any child, and nowhere is 
it pure. We call partial half-lights, by courtesy, ge- 
nius ; talent which converts itself to money ; talent 
which glitters to-day, that it may dine and sleep well 
to-morrow ; and society is officered by men of parts, 
as they are properly called, and not by divine men. 
These use their gift to refine luxury, not to abolish 
it. Genius is always ascetic ; and piety and love. 
Appetite shows to the finer souls as a disease, and 
they find beauty in rites and bounds that resist it. 

We have found out fine names to cover our sensu- 
ality withal, but no gifts can raise intemperance. 
The man of talent affects to call his transgressions of 
the laws of the senses trivial, and to count them noth- 
ing considered with his devotion to his art. His art 
never taught him lewdness, nor the love of wine, nor 
the wish to reap where he had not sowed. His art is 
less for every deduction from his hoHness, and less for 
jvery defect of common sense. On him who scorned 
the world, as he said, the scorned world wreaks its 
revenge. He that despiseth small things will perish 
by little and little. Goethe's Tasso is very likely to 
be a pretty fair historical portrait, and that is true 
tragedy. It does not seem to me so genuine grief 
when some tyrannous Richard the Third oppresses 



1 82 JESS AY VII. 

and slays a score of innocent persons, as when An- 
tonio and Tasso, both apparently right, wrong each 
other. One living after the maxims of this world, 
and consistent and true to them, the other fired with 
all divine sentiments, yet grasping also at the pleas- 
ures of sense, without submitting to their law. That 
is a grief we all feel, a knot we cannot untie. Tasso's 
is no infrequent case in modern biography. A man 
of genius, of an ardent temperament, reckless of phys- 
ical laws, self-indulgent, becomes presently unfortu- 
nate, querulous, a " discomfortable cousin," a thorn 
to himself and to others. 

The scholar shames us by his bifold life. Whilst 
something higher than prudence is active, he is admi- 
rable ; when common sense is wanted, he is an encum- 
brance. Yesterday, Caesar was not so great ; to-day, 
the felon at the gallows' foot is not more miserable. 
Yesterday, radiant with the light of an ideal world, in 
which he lives, the first of men ; and now, oppressed 
by wants and by sickness, for which he must thank 
himself. He resembles the pitiful drivellers, whom 
travellers describe as frequenting the bazaars of Con- 
stantinople, who skulk about all day, yellow, emaci- 
ated, ragged, sneaking;' and at evening, when the 
bazaars are open, slink to the opium-shop, swallow 
their morsel, and become tranquil and glorified seers. 
And who has not seen the tragedy of imprudent gen- 
ius, struggling for years with paltry pecuniary difficul- 
ties, at last sinking, chilled, exhausted, and fruitless, 
like a giant slaughtered by pins ? 

Is it not better that a man should accept the first 
pains and mortifications of this sort, which nature is 



PRUDENCE. 183 

not slack in sending him, as hints that he must 
expect no other good than the just fruit of his own 
labor and self-denial '? Health, bread, climate, social 
position, have their importance, and he will give them 
their due. Let him esteem Nature a perpetual coun- 
sellor, and her perfections the exact measure of our 
deviations. Let him make the night night, and the 
day day. Let him control the habit of expense. Let 
him see that as much wisdom may be expended on a 
private economy as on an empire, and as much wis- 
dom may be drawn from it. The laws of the world 
are written out for him on every piece of mopey in his 
hand. There is nothing he will not be the better for 
knowing, were it only the wisdom of Poor Eichard ; 
or the State-Street prudence of buying by the acre to 
sell by the foot ; or the thrift of the agriculturist, to 
stick a tree between whiles, because it will grow 
whilst he sleeps ; or the prudence which consists in 
husbanding little strokes of the tool, little portions of 
time, particles of stock, and small gains. The eye of 
prudence may never shut. Iron, if kept at the iron- 
monger's, will rust ; beer, if not brewed in the right 
state of the atmosphere, will sour; timber of ships 
will rot at sea, or, if laid up high and dry, will strain, 
warp, and dry-rot ; money, if kept by us, yields no 
rent, and is liable to loss ; if invested, is liable to de- 
preciation of the particular kind of stock. Strike, 
says the smith, the iron is white ; keep the rake, says 
the haymaker, as nigh the scythe as you can, and the 
cart as nigh the rake. Our Yankee trade is reputed 
to be very much on the extreme of this prudence. It 
takes bank-notes, — good, bad, clean, ragged, — and 



1 84 USSAY VIL 

saves itself by the speed with which it passes them off. 
Iron cannot rust, nor beer sour, nor timber rot, nor 
calicoes go out of fashion, nor money stocks depreciate, 
in the few swift moments in which the Yankee suffers 
any one of them to remain in his possession. In skat- 
ing over thin ice, our safety is in our speed. 

Let him learn a prudence of a higher strain. Let 
him learn that everything in nature, even motes and 
feathers go by law and not by luck, and that what 
he sows he reaps. By diligence and self-command, 
let him put the bread he eats at his own disposal, that 
he may not stand in bitter and false relations to other 
men • for the best good of wealth is freedom. Let 
him practise the minor virtues. How much of human 
life is lost in waiting ! let him not make his fellow- 
creatures wait. How many words and promises are 
promises of conversation! let his be words of fate. 
When he sees a folded and sealed scrap of paper float 
round the globe in a pine ship, and come safe to the 
eye for which it was written, amidst a swarming popu- 
lation, let him likewise feel the admonition to integrate 
his being across all these distracting forces, and keep 
a slender human word among the storms, distances, 
and accidents that drive us hither and thither, and, 
by persistency, make the paltry force of one man 
reappear to redeem its pledge, after months and years, 
in the most distant climates. 

We must not try to write the laws of any one virtue, 
looking at that only. Human nature loves no con- 
tradictions, but is symmetrical. The prudence which 
secures an outward well-being is not to be studied by 
one set of men, whilst heroism and holiness are studied 



PRUDENCE, 185 

by another, but they are reconcilable. Prudence con- 
cerns the present time, persons, property, and exist- 
ing forms. But as every fact hath its roots in the soul, 
and, if the soul were changed, would cease to be, or 
would become some other thing, the proper adminis- 
tration of outward things will always rest on a just 
apprehension of their cause and origin; that is, the 
good man will be the wise man, and the single- 
hearted, the politic man. Every violation of truth is 
not only a sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at 
the health of human society. On the most profitable 
lie, the course of events presently lays a destructive 
tax ; whilst frankness invites frankness, puts the par- 
ties on a convenient footing, and makes their business 
a friendship. Trust men, and they will be true to 
you; treat them greatly, and they will show them- 
selves great, though they make an exception in your 
favor to all their rules of trade. 

So, in regard to disagreeable and formidable things, 
prudence does not consist in evasion, or in flight, but 
in courage. He who wishes to walk in the most 
peaceful parts of life with any serenity must screw 
himself up to resolution. Let him front the object of 
his worst apprehension, and his stoutness will com- 
monly make his fear groundless. The Latin proverb 
says, that '' in battle the eye is first overcome." En- 
tire self-possession may make a battle very little more 
dangerous to life than a match at foils or at football. 
Examples are cited by soldiers, of men who have seen 
the cannon pointed, and the fire given to it, and who 
have stepped aside from the path of the ball. The 
terrors of the storm are chiefly confined to the parlor 



i86 JESSAY VIL 

and the cabin. The drover, the sailor, buffets it all 
day, and his health renews itself at as vigorous a pulse 
under the sleet as under the sun of June. 

In the occurrence of unpleasant things among 
neighbors, fear comes readily to heart, and magnifies 
the consequence of the other party ; but it is a bad 
counsellor. Every man is actually weak, and appar- 
ently strong. To himself, he seems weak ; to others, 
formidable. You are afraid of Grim ; but Grim also 
is afraid of you. You are solicitous of the good- will 
of the meanest person, uneasy at his ill-will. But 
the sturdiest offender of your peace and of the neigh- 
borhood, if you rip up his claims, is as thin and timid 
as any ; and the peace of society is often kept, because, 
as children say, one is afraid, and the other dares not. 
Par off, men swell, bully, and threaten ; bring them 
hand to hand, and they are a feeble folk. 

It is a proverb that " courtesy costs nothing " ; but 
calculation might come to value love for its profit. 
Love is fabled to be blind ; but kindness is necessary 
to perception. Love is not a hood, but an eye-water. 
If you meet a sectary, or a hostile partisan, never rec- 
ognize the dividing lines ; but meet on what common 
ground remains, — if only that the sun shines, and 
the rain rains for both ; the area will widen very fast, 
and ere you know it the boundary mountains, on 
which the eye had fastened, have melted into air. If 
they set out to contend. Saint Paul will lie, and Saint 
John will hate. What low, poor, paltry, hypocritical 
people an argument on religion will make of the pure 
and chosen souls ! They will shuffle, and crow, 
crook, and hide, feign to confess here, only that they 



PRUDENCE. 187 

may brag and conquer there, and not a thought has 
enriched either party, and not an emotion of bravery, 
modesty, or hope. So neither should you put your- 
self in a false position with your contemporaries, by 
indulging a vein of hostility and bitterness. Though 
your views are in straight antagonism to theirs, 
assume an identity of sentiment, assume that you are 
saying precisely that which all think, and in the flow 
of wit and love roll out your paradoxes in solid col- 
umn, with not the infirmity of a doubt. So at least 
shall you get an adequate deliverance. The natural mo- 
tions of the soul are so much better than the voluntary 
ones, that you will never do yourself justice in dispute. 
The thought is not then taken hold of by the right 
handle, does not show itself proportioned, and in its true 
bearings, but bears extorted, hoarse, and half witness. 
But assume a consent, and it shall presently be grant- 
ed, since really, and underneath their external diver- 
sities, all men are of one heart and mind. 

Wisdom will never let us stand with any man or 
men on an unfriendly footing. We refuse sympathy 
and intimacy with people, as if we waited for some 
better sympathy and intimacy to come. But whence 
and when? To-morrow will be like to-day. Life 
wastes itself whilst we are preparing to live. Our 
friends and fellow-workers die off from us. Scarcely 
can we say, we see new men, new women, approach- 
ing us. We are too old to regard fashion, too old to 
expect patronage of any greater or more powerful. 
Let us suck the sweetness of those affections and con- 
suetudes that grow near us. These old shoes are easy 
to the feet. Undoubtedly, we can easily pick faults 



i88 ESSAY VIL 

in our company, can easily whi«per names prouder, 
and that tickle the fancy more. Every man's imagi- 
nation hath its friends ; and life would be dearer with 
such companions. But, if you cannot have them on 
good mutual terms, you cannot have them. If not 
the Deity, but our ambition, hews and shapes the new 
relations, their virtue escapes, as strawberries lose their 
flavor in garden-beds. 

Thus truth, frankness, courage, love, humility, and 
all the virtues, range themselves on the side of pru- 
dence, or the art of securing a present well-being. I do 
not know if all matter will be found to be made of one 
element, as oxygen or hydrogen, at last ; but the world 
of manners and actions is wrought of one stuff, and, 
begin where we will, we are pretty sure in a short space 
to be mumbling our ten commandments. 



HEROISM. 



" Paradise is under the shadow of swords." 

Mahomet, 



Ruby wine is drunk by knaves ; 
Sugar spends to fatten slaves ; 
Rose and vine-leaf deck buffoons ; 
Thunderclouds are Jove's festoons, 
Trooping oft in wreaths of dread 
Lightning-knotted round his head 5 
The hero is not fed on sweets, 
Daily his own heart he eats ; 
Chambers of the great are jails, 
And head-winds right for royal sails. 



ESSAY vni. 



HEROISM. 




f]N the elder English dramatists, and mainly 
in the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher, 
there is a constant recognition of gentility, 
as if a noble behavior were as easily marked 
in the society of their age as color is in our Ameri- 
can population. When any Rodrigo, Pedro, or Yale- 
rio enters, though he be a stranger, the duke or gov- 
ernor exclaims, " This is a gentleman," and proffers 
civilities without end ; but all the rest are slag and 
refuse. In harmony with this delight in personal 
advantages, there is in their plays a certain heroic cast 
of character and dialogue, — as in Bonduca, Sopho- 
cles, the Mad Lover, the Double Marriage, — wherein 
the speaker is so earnest and cordial, and on such 
deep grounds of character, that the dialogue, on the 
slightest additional incident in the plot, rises naturally 
into poetry. Among many texts, take the following. 
The Roman Martins has conquered Athens, — all but 
the invincible spirits of Sophocles, the duke of 
Athens, and Dorigen, his wife. The beauty of the 
latter inflames Martins, and he seeks to save her hus- 
band ; but Sophocles will not ask his life, although 



192 JESS AY VIIL 

assured that a word will save him, and the execution 
of both proceeds. 

" Valerius. Bid thy wife farewell. 

Soph. No, I will take no leave. My Dorigen, 
Yonder, above, 'bout Ariadne's crown, 
My spirit shall hover for thee. Prithee, haste. 

Dor. Stay, Sophocles, — with this tie up my sight j 
Let not soft nature so transformed be, 
And lose her gentler-sexed humanity. 
To make me see my lord bleed. So, 'tis well 5 
Never one object underneath the sun 
Will I behold before my Sophocles : 
Farewell ; now teach the Romans how to die. 

Mar. Dost know what 't is to die ? 

Soph. Thou dost not, Martins, 
And, therefore, not whah't is to live : to die 
Is to begin to live. It is to end 
An old, stale, weary work, and to commence 
A newer and a better. 'T is to leave 
Deceitful knaves for the society 
Of gods and goodness. Thou thyself must part 
At last from all thy garlands, pleasures, triumphs, 
And prove thy fortitude what then 't will do. 

Val. But art not grieved nor vexed to leave thy life thus ? 

Soph. Why should I grieve or vex for being sent 
To them I ever loved best ? Now I '11 kneel, 
But with my back toward thee ; 't is the last duty 
This trunk can do the gods. 

Mar. Strike, strike, Valerius, 
Or Martins' heart will leap out at his mouth. 
This is a man, a woman ! Kiss thy lord. 
And live with all the freedom you were wont. 
love ! thou doubly bast afflicted me 
With virtue and with beauty. Treacherous heart, 
My hand shall cast thee quick into my urn, 
Ere thou transgress this knot of piety. 

Val. What ails my brother ? 

Soph. Martins, Martins, 
Thou now hast found a way to conquer me ! 

Dor. star of Rome ! what gratitude can speak 
Fit words to follow such a deed as this ? 



HEROISM. 193 

Mar. This admirable duke, Valerius, 
With his disdain of fortune and of death, 
Captived himself, has captivated me ; 
And though my arm hath ta'en his body here, 
His soul hath subjugated Martins' soul. 
By Romulus, he is all soul, I think 5 
He hath no flesh, and spirit cannot be gyved ; 
Then we have vanquished nothing *, he is free, 
And Martins walks now in captivity." 

I dp not readily remember any poem, play, sermon, 
novel, or oration, that our press vents in the last few 
years, which goes to the same tune. We have a 
great many flutes and flageolets, but not often the 
sound of any fife. Yet, Wordsworth^s Laodamia, 
and the ode of " Dion," and some sonnets, have a cer- 
tain noble music ; and Scott will sometimes draw a 
stroke like the portrait of Lord Evandale, given by 
Balfour of Burley. Thomas Carlyle, with his natural 
taste for what is manly and daring in character, has 
suffered no heroic trait in his favorites to drop from 
his biographical and historical pictures. Earlier, Rob- 
ert Burns has given us a song or two. In the Har- 
leian Miscellanies, there is an account of the battle of 
Lutzen, which deserves to be read. And Simon Ock- 
ley's History of the Saracens recounts the prodigies 
of individual valor with admiration, all the more evi- 
dent on the part of the narrator, that he seems to 
think that his place in Christian Oxford requires of 
him some proper protestations of abhorrence. But, if 
we explore the literature of Heroism, we shall quickly 
come to Plutarch, who is its doctor and historian. 
To him we owe the Brasidas, the Dion, the Epami- 
nondas, the Scipio, of old ; and I must think we are 
13 



194 ESSAY VI I L 

more deeply indebted to him than to all the ancient 
writers. Each of his " Lives " is a refutation to the 
despondency and cowardice of our religious and polit- 
ical theorists. A wild courage, a Stoicism not of the 
schools, but of the blood, shines in every anecdote, 
and has given that book its immense fame. 

We need books of this tart cathartic virtue, more 
than books of political science, or of private economy. 
Life is a festival only to the wise. Seen from the nook 
and chimney-side of prudence, it wears a ragged and 
dangerous front. The violations of the laws of nature 
by our predecessors and our contemporaries are pun- 
ished in us also. The disease and deformity around 
us certify the infraction of natural, intellectual, and 
moral laws, and often violation on violation to breed 
such compound misery. A lockjaw that bends a man's 
head back to his heels ; hydrophobia, that makes him 
bark at his wife and babes ; insanity, that makes him 
eat grass ; war, plague, cholera, famine, — indicate a 
certain ferocity in nature, which, as it had its inlet by 
human crime, must have its outlet by human suffer- 
ing. Unhappily, no man exists who has not in his 
own person become, to some amount, a stockholder in 
the sin, and so made himself liable to a share in the 
expiation. 

Our culture, therefore, must not omit the arming 
of the man. Let him hear in season, that he is born 
into the state of war, and that the commonwealth and 
his own well-being require that he should not go dan- 
cing in the weeds of peace ; but warned, self-collected, 
and neither defying nor dreading the thunder, let him 
take both reputation and life in his hand, and, with 



HEROISM. 



195 



perfect urbanity, dare the gibbet and the mob by the 
absolute truth of his speech, and the rectitude of his 
behavior. 

Towards all this external evil, the man within the 
breast assumes a warlike attitude, and affirms his abil- 
ity to cope single-handed with the infinite army of 
enemies V To this military attitude of the soul we 
give the name of Heroism. Its rudest form is the con- 
tempt for safety and ease, which makes the attractive- 
ness of war. It is a self-trust which slights the re- 
straints of prudence, in the plenitude of its energy and 
power to repair the harms it may suffer. The hero is 
a mind of such balance that no disturbances can shake 
his will; but pleasantly, and, as it were, merrily, he 
advances to his own music, alike in frightful alarms 
and in the tipsy mirth of universal dissoluteness. 
There is somewhat not philosophical in heroism ; 
there is somewhat not holy in it ; it seems not to 
know that other souls are of one texture with it ; it 
has pride ; it is the extreme of individual nature. 
Nevertheless, we must profoundly revere it. There is 
somewhat in great actions, which does not allow us to 
go behind them. Heroism feels and never reasons, 
and therefore is always right ; and although a differ- 
ent breeding, different religion, and greater intellectu- 
al activity would have modified or even reversed the 
particular action, yet for the hero that thing he does is 
the highest deed, and is not open to the censure of 
philosophers or divines. It is the avowal of the un- 
schooled man, that he finds a quality in him that is 
negligent of expense, of health, of life, of danger, of 
hatred, of reproach, and knows that his will is higher 



196 ESSAY VIIL 

and more excellent than all actual and all possible 
antagonists. 

Heroism works in contradiction to the voice of 
mankind, and in contradiction, for a time, to the voice 
of the great and good. Heroism is an obedience to a 
secret impulse of an individuars character. Now to 
no other man can its wisdom appear as it does to 
him, for every man must be supposed to see a little 
farther on his own proper path than any one else. 
Therefore, just and wise men take umbrage at his act, 
until after some little time be past : then they see it 
to be in unison with their acts. All prudent men see 
that the action is clean contrary to a sensual prosper- 
ity ; for every heroic act measures itself by its con- 
tempt of some external good. But it finds its own 
success at last, and then the prudent also extol. 

Self-trust is the essence of heroism. It is the state 
of the soul at war ; and its ultimate objects are the last 
defiance of falsehood and wrong, and the power to 
bear all that can be inflicted by evil agents. It 
speaks the truth, and it is just, generous, hospitable, 
temperate, scornful of petty calculations, and scornful 
of being scorned. It persists ; it is of an undaunted 
boldness, and of a fortitude not to be wearied out. 
Its jest is the littleness of common life. That false 
prudence which dotes on health and wealth is the butt 
and merriment of heroism. Heroism, like Plotinus, is 
almost ashamed of its body. What shall it say, then, 
to the sugar-plums and cat's-cradles, to the toilet, 
compliments, quarrels, cards, and custard, which rack 
the wit of all society. What joys has kind nature 
provided for us dear creatures ! There seems to be 



HEROISM. 



197 



no interval between greatness and meanness. When 
the spirit is not master of the world, then it is its 
dupe. Yet the little man takes the great hoax so in- 
nocently, works in it so headlong and believing, is 
born red, and dies gray, arranging his toilet, attend- 
ing on his own health, laying traps for sweet food and 
strong 'xvine, setting his heart on a horse or a rifle, 
made happy with a little gossip or a little praise, that 
the "great soul cannot choose but laugh at such earnest 
nonsense. " Indeed, these humble considerations make 
me out of love with greatness. What a disgrace is it 
to me to take note how many pairs of silk stockings 
thou hast, namely, these and those that were the 
peach-colored ones ; or to bear the inventory of thy 
shirts, as one for superfluity, and one other for use ! " 
Citizens, thinking after the laws of arithmetic, con- 
sider the inconvenience of receiving strangers at their 
fireside, reckon narrowly the loss of time and the un- 
usual display : the soul of a better quality thrusts 
back the unseasonable economy into the vaults of life, 
and says, I will obey the God, and the sacrifice and 
the fire he will provide. Ibn Hankal, the Arabian 
geographer, describes an heroic extreme in the hospi- 
tality of Sogd, in Bukharia. " When I was in Sogd, 
I saw a great building, like a palace, the gates of which 
were open and fixed back to the wall with large nails. 
I asked the reason, and was told that the house had 
not been shut, night or day, for a hundred years. 
Strangers may present themselves at any hour, and in 
whatever number ; the master has amply provided for 
the reception of the men and their animals, and is 
never happier than when they tarry for some time. 



198 ESSAY VIIL 

Nothing of the kind have I seen in any other coun- 
try/' The magnanimous know very well that they 
who give time, or money, or shelter, to the stran- 
ger — so it be done for love, and not for ostenta- 
tion — do, as it were, put God under obligation to 
them, so perfect are the compensations of the universe. 
In some way the time they seem to lose is redeemed, 
and the pains they seem to take remunerate them- 
selves. These men fan the flame of human love, and 
raise the standard of civil virtue among mankind. 
But hospitality must be for service, and not for show, 
or it pulls down the host. The brave soul rates itself 
too high to value itself by the splendor of its table and 
draperies. It gives what it hath, and all it hath, but 
its own majesty can lend a better grace to bannocks 
and fair water than belong to city feasts. 

The temperance of the hero proceeds from the same 
wish to do no dishonor to the worthiness he has. 
But he loves it for its elegancy, not for its austerity. 
It seems not worth his while to be solemn, and de- 
nounce with bitterness flesh-eating, or wine-drinking, 
the use of tobacco, or opium, or tea, or silk, or gold. 
A great man scarcely knows how he dines, how he 
dresses ; but without railing or precision, his living is 
natural and poetic. John Eliot, the Indian Apostle, 
drank water, and said of wine, " It is a noble, gen- 
erous liquor, and we should be humbly thankful for it ; 
but, as I remember, water was made before it." Bet- 
ter still, is the temperance of King David, who poured 
out on the ground unto the Lord the water which 
three of his warriors had brought him to drink, at the 
peril of their lives. 



HEROISM. 



199 



It is told of Bnitus, that when he fell on his sword, 
after the battle of Philippi, he quoted a line of Euri- 
pides, " O virt^ie ! I have followed thee through life, 
and I find thee at last but a shade/' I doubt not 
the hero is slandered by this report. The heroic soul 
does not sell its justice and its nobleness. It does not 
ask to /dine nicely, and to sleep warm. The essence 
of greatness is the perception that virtue is enough. 
Poverty is its ornament. It does not need plenty, and 
can very well abide its loss. 

But that which takes my fancy most, in the heroic 
class, is the good humor and hilarity they exhibit. 
It is a height to which common duty can very well 
attain, to suffer and to dare with solemnity. But 
these rare souls set opinion, success, and life, at so 
cheap a rate, that they will not soothe their enemies 
by petitions, or the show of sorrow, but wear their 
own habitual greatness. Scipio, charged with pecula- 
tion, refuses to do himself so great a disgrace as to 
wait for justification, though he had the scroll of his 
accounts in his hands, but tears it to pieces before the 
tribunes. Socrates's condemnation of himself to be 
maintained in all honor in the Prytaneum, during his 
life, and Sir Thomas More's playfulness at the scaf- 
fold, are of the same strain. In Beaumont and Fletch- 
er's " Sea Voyage," Juletta tells the stout captain 
and his company, — 

" Jul. Why, slaves, 't is in our power to hang ye, 

Master. Very likely, 

'T is in our powers, then, to be hanged, and scorn ye." 

These replies are sound and whole. Sport is the 
bloom and glow of a perfect health. The great will not 



200 ESSAY VIIL 

condescend to take any thing seriously ; all must be 
as gay as the song of a canary, though it were the 
building of cities, or the eradication of old and foolish 
churches and nations, which have cumbered the earth 
long thousands of years. Simple hearts put all the 
history and customs of this world behind them, and 
play their own game in innocent defiance of the Blue- 
Laws of the world ; and such would appear, could we 
see the human race assembled in vision, like little chil- 
dren frolicking together ; though, to the eyes of man- 
kind at large, they wear a stately and solemn garb of 
works and influences. 

The interest these fine stories have for us, the power 
of a romance over the boy who grasps the forbidden 
book under his bench at school, our delight in the 
hero, is the main fact to our purpose. All these great 
■and transcendent properties are ours. If we dilate in 
beholding the Greek energy, the Roman pride, it is 
that we are already domesticating the same sentiment. 
Let us find room for this great guest in our small 
houses. The first step of worthiness will be to disa- 
buse us of our superstitious associations with places 
and times, with number and size. Why should these 
words, Athenian, Roman, Asia, and England, so tin- 
gle in the ear 1 Where the heart is, there the muses, 
there the gods sojourn, and not in any geography of 
fame. Massachusetts, Connecticut River, and Boston 
Bay you think paltry places, and the ear loves names 
of foreign and classic topography. But here we are ; 
and, if we will tarry a little, we may come to learn 
that here is best. See to it, only, that thyself is here ; 
and art and nature, hope and fate, friends, angels, 



HEROISM. 201 

and the Supreme Being, shall not be absent from the 
chamber where thou sittest. Epammondas, brave and 
affectionate, does not seem to us to need Olympus to 
die upon, nor the Syrian sunshine. He lies very well 
where he is. The Jerseys were handsome ground 
enough for Washington to tread, and London streets 
for the feet of Milton. A great man makes his cli- 
mate genial in the imagination of men, and its air the 
beloved element of all delicate spirits. That country 
IS the fairest which is inhabited by the noblest minds. 
The pictures which fill the imagination in reading the 
actions of Pericles, Xenophon, Columbus, Bayard, 
Sidney, Hampden, teach us how needlessly mean our 
life is, that we, by the depth of our living, should 
deck it with more than regal or national splendor, 
and act on principles that should interest man and 
nature in the length of our days. 

We have seen or heard of many extraordinary 
young men, who never ripened, or whose performance 
in actual life was not extraordinary. When we see 
their air and mien, when we hear them speak of soci- 
ety, of books, of religion, we admire their superiority, 
they seem to throw contempt on our entire polity and 
social state; theirs is the tone of a youthful giant, 
who is sent to work revolutions. But they enter an 
active profession, and the forming Colossus shrinks to 
the common size of man. The magic they used was 
the ideal tendencies, which always make the Actual 
ridiculous ; but the tough world had its revenge the 
moment they put their horses of the sun to plough in 
its furrow. They found no example and no compan- 
ion, and their heart fainted. What then ? The les- 



202 ESSAY VIIL 

son they gave in their first aspirations is yet true; and 
a better valor and a purer truth shall one day organize 
their belief. Or why should a woman liken herself to 
any historical woman, and think, because Sappho, or 
Sevigne, or De Stael, or the cloistered souls who have 
had genius and cultivation, do not satisfy the imagina- 
tion and the serene Themis, none can, — certainly not 
she. Why not? She has a new and unattempted 
problem to solve, perchance that of the happiest na- 
ture that ever bloomed. Let the maiden, with erect 
soul, walk serenely on her way, accept the hint of each 
new experience, search in turn all the objects that so- 
licit her eye, that she may learn the power and the 
charm of her new-born being, which is the kindling of 
a new dawn in the recesses of space. The fair girl, 
who repels interference by a decided and proud choice 
of influences, so careless of pleasing, so wilful and 
lofty, inspires every beholder with somewhat of her 
own nobleness. The silent heart encourages her ; O 
friend, never strike sail to a fear ! Come into port 
greatly, or sail with God the seas. Not in vain you 
live, for every passing eye is cheered and refined by 
the vision. 

The characteristic of heroism is its persistency. 
All men have wandering impulses, fits, and starts of 
generosity. But when you have chosen your part, 
abide by it, and do not weakly try to reconcile your- 
self with the world. The heroic cannot be the com- 
mon, nor the common the heroic. Yet we have the 
weakness to expect the sympathy of people in those 
actions whose excellence is that they outrun sympa- 
thy, and appeal to a tardy justice. If you would 



HEROISM, 203 

serve your brother, because it is fit for you to serve 
him, do not take back your words when you find that 
prudent people do not commend you. Adhere to 
your own act, and congratulate yourself if you have 
done something strange and extravagant, and broken 
the monotony of a decorous age. It was a high 
counsel that I once heard given to a yoang person, — 
<' Always do what you are afraid to do." A simple, 
manly character need never make an apology, but 
s'liould regard its past action with the calmness of 
Phocion, when he admitted that the event of the battle 
was happy, yet did not regret his dissuasion from the 
battle. 

There is no weakness or exposure for which we 
cannot find consolation in the thought, — this is a 
part of my constitution, part of my relation and ofiice 
to my fellow-creature. Has nature covenanted with 
me that I should never appear to disadvantge, never 
make a ridiculous figure? Let us be generous of 
our dignity as well as of our money. Greatness 
once and for ever has done with opinion. We tell 
our charities, not because we wish to be praised for 
them, not because we think they have great merit, but 
for our justification. It is a capital blunder; as you 
discover, when another man recites his charities. 

To speak the truth, even with some austerity, to 
live with some rigor of temperance, or some extremes 
of generosity, seems to be an asceticism which common 
good-nature would appoint to those who are at ease 
and in plenty, in sign that they feel a brotherhood 
with the great multitude of suffering men. And not 
only need we breathe and exercise the soul by assum- 



-^ 



ESSAY VIU. 



ing flie penalties of abstmence, of debt, of solHode, of 
vopopiilsitT, bat it behooTes die wise man to look 
with a bcM ere into tbose T9xcr dangers which some- 
times inTade wesL, and fo fiuniliaiixe himsdf with dis- 
gusting forms of disease, with soimds of exeeratlcn, 
and the vision of Tic^ent death. 

Times of heroi^i are genenllr times of tenor, bat 
the daj nerer shines in whidi this dem^it may not 
work. The dreanistances of man, we saj, are his- 
toricallj somei^at better in this coantry, and at this 
hour, than perhaps ewer before. More fireedom exists 
for coltnre. It win not now ran against an axe at 
the first step oat of the beaten track of opinion. Bat 
whoso B heme will ahrajs find crises to try his edge. 
Human Tirtne demands her (^ampioos and martyrs, 
and die trial of penecotion alwajs proceeds. It is 
but the <Mher day tiiat die brave Lotc^t gave his 
breast to tiie bnDets of a mob, isx die rights of free 
spee^ and opfanon, and died whoi it was better not 
tofireu 

I see not any road of perfect peace which a man 
can walk, hot after die eoonad of his own bosom. 
Let him qait too much assoriation, let him go home 
modi, and stablish himsdf in those courses he ap- 
piOTes. The oniemitting retention of simple and 
high sentiments in obscore daties is hardraiing the 
character to that temper which will work with honor, 
if need be, in the tomolt, or on the scaffold. What- 
erer ootniges hare happened to moi may befall a man 
again ; and tct^ easUy in a republic, if there appear 
any 9^^ of a dec^ of rdigion. Coarse slander, fire, 
tar and feathers, and the gibbet, die youth may fredy 



HEROISM. 



205 



bring home to his mind, and with what sweetness of 
temper he can, and inquire how &sfc he can fix his 
sense of duty, braYing such penalties, whenerer it may 
please the next newspapo* and a sufficient number of 
his ndghbors to pronounce his opinions incendiaij. 

It may calm the apprehension of calamity in the 
most susceptible heart to see how quick a bound na- 
ture has set to the utmost infliction of malice. We 
rapidly approach a brink orer which no enemy can 
/follow us. 

Thoa art qoiet in fliy grwe." 

In the gloom of our ignorance of what shall be, in 
the hour when we are deaf to the higher voices, who 
dd^ not enry those who Imve seen safely to an end 
their manly endeaTor % Who that sees the meanness 
of our politics, but inly congratulates Washington that 
he is long already wrapped in his shroud, and for ever 
safe ; that he was laid sweet in his graye, the hope of 
humanity not yet subjugated in him % Who does not 
sometimes envy the good and braTe, who are no more 
to sufier firom the tumults of the natural world, and 
await with curious complacency the speedy term of 
his own conversation with finite nature ? And yet 
the love that will be annihilated sooner than treacher- 
ous has already made death impossible, and affirms 
itself no mortal, but a native of the deqis of absolate 
and inextiniruishable being. 



THE OVEE-SOUL. 



" But souls that of his own good life partake, 
He loves as his own self ; dear as his eye 
They are to Him : He '11 never them forsake : 
When they shall die, then God himself shall die. 
They live, they live in blest eternity." 

Henry More, 

Space is ample, east and west, 

But two cannot go abreast, 

Cannot travel in it two ; 

Yonder masterful cuckoo 

Crowds every egg out of the nest, 

Quick or dead, except its own ; 

A spell is laid on sod and stone, 

Night and Day 've been tampered with, 

Every quality and pith 

Surcharged and sultry with a power 

That works its will on age and hour. 



ESSAY IX. 



THE OVER-SOUL. 




JIHERE is a difference between one and an- 
other hour of life, in their authority and 
subsequent effect. Our faith comes in mo- 
ments ; our vice is habitual. Yet there is 
a depth in those brief moments which constrains us to 
ascribe more reality to them than to all other experi- 
ences. For this reason, the argument which is always 
forthcoming to silence those who conceive extraordi- 
nary hopes of man, namely, the appeal to experience, 
is forever invalid and vain. We give up the past to 
the objector, and yet we hope. He must explain this 
hope. We grant that human life is mean ; but how 
did we find out that it was mean? What is the 
ground of this uneasiness of ours ; of this old discon- 
tent ? What is the universal sense of want and igno- 
rance, but the fine innuendo by which the soul makes 
its enormous claim ? Why do men feel that the nat- 
ural history of man has never been written, but he is 
always leaving behind what you have said of him, and 
it becomes old, and books of metaphysics worthless ? 
The philosophy of six thousand years has not searched 
the chambers and magazines of the soul. In its ex- 
14 



2IO ESSAY IX. 

periments there has always remained, in the last anal- 
ysis, a residuum it could not resolve. Man is a stream 
whose source is hidden. Our being is descending in- 
to us from we know not whence. The most exact 
calculator has no prescience that somewhat incalcula- 
ble may not balk the very next moment. I am con- 
strained every moment to acknowledge a higher origin 
for events than the will I call mine. 

As with events, so is it with thoughts. When I 
watch that flowing river, which, out of regions I see 
not, pours for a season its streams into me, I see that 
I am a pensioner ; not a cause, but a surprised spec- 
tator of this ethereal water ; that I desire and look up, 
and put myself in the attitude of reception, but from 
some alien energy the visions come. 

The Supreme Critic on the errors of the past and 
the present, and the only prophet of that which must 
be, is that great nature in which we rest, as the earth 
lies in the soft arms of the atmosphere ; that Unity, 
that Over-soul, within which every man's particular 
being is contained and made one with all other ; that 
common heart, of which all sincere conversation is the 
worship, to which all right action is submission ; that 
overpowering reality which confutes our tricks and 
talents, and constrains every one to pass for what he 
is, and to speak from his character, and not from his 
tongue, and which evermore tends to pass into our 
thought and hand, and become wisdom, and virtue, 
and power, and beauty. We live in succession, in 
division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man 
is the soul of the whole ; the wise silence ; the univer- 
sal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally 



THE OVER-SOUL. 211 

related; the eternal One. And this deep power in 
which we exist, and whose beatitude is all accessible 
to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every 
hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the 
seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are 
one. We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, 
the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of 
which these are the shining parts, is the soul. Only 
by the vision of that Wisdom can the horoscope of the 
g(ges be read, and by falling back on our better 
thoughts, by yielding to the spirit of prophecy which is 
innate in every man, we can know what it saith. 
Every man's words, who speaks from that life, must 
sound vain to those who do not dwell in the same 
thought on their own part. I dare not speak for it. 
My words do not carry its august sense; they fall 
short and cold. Only itself can inspire whom it will, 
and behold ! their speech shall be lyrical, and sweet, 
and universal as the rising of the wind. Yet I desire, 
even by profane words, if I may not use sacred, to 
indicate the heaven of this deity, and to report what 
hints I have collected of the transcendent simplicity 
and energy of the Highest Law. 

If we consider what happens in conversation, in rev- 
eries, in remorse, in times of passion, in surprises, in 
the instructions of dreams, wherein often we see our- 
selves in masquerade, — the droll disguises only mag- 
nifying and enhancing a real element, and forcing it 
on our distinct notice, — we shall catch many hints 
that will broaden and lighten into knowledge of the 
secret of nature. All goes to show that the soul in 
man is not an organ, but animates and exercises all 



212 JESSAY IX. 

the organs ; is not a function, like the power of mem- 
ory, of calculation, of comparison, but uses these as 
hands and feet ; is not a faculty, but a light ; is not 
the intellect or the will, but the master of the intellect 
and the will ; is the background of our being, in which 
they lie, — an immensity not possessed and that can- 
not be possessed. From within or from behind, a light 
shines through us upon things, and makes us aware 
that we are nothing, but the light is all. A man is 
the fa9ade of a temple wherein all wisdom and all good 
abide. What we commonly call man, the eating, drink- 
ing, planting, counting man, does not, as we know him, 
represent himself, but misrepresents himself. Him 
we do not respect, but the soul, whose organ he is, 
would he let it appear through his action, would make 
our knees bend. When it breathes through his intel- 
lect, it is genius ; when it breathes through his will, it 
is virtu6^; when it flows through his affection, it is love. 
And the blindness of the intellect begins, when it 
would be something of itself. The weakness of the 
will begins, when the individual would be something 
of himself All reform aims, in some one particular, 
to let the soul have its way through us ; in other 
words, to engage us to obey. ' 

Of this pure nature every man is at some time sen- 
sible. Language cannot paint it with his colors. It 
is too subtile. It is undefinable, unmeasurable, but 
we know that it pervades and contains us. We know 
that all spiritual being is in man. A wise old prov- 
erb says, " God comes to see us without bell " ; that 
is, as there is no screen or ceiling between our heads 
and the infinite heavens, so is there no bar or wall 



THE OVER-BOUL. 213 

in the soul where man, the effect, ceases, and God, the 
cause, begins. The walls are taken away. We lie 
open on one side to the deeps of spiritual nature, to 
the attributes of God. Justice we see and know, 
Love, Freedom, Power. These natures no man ever 
got above, but they tower over us, and most in the 
moment when our interests tempt us to wound them. 

The sovereignty of this nature whereof we speak is 
made known by its independency of those limitations 
^vhich circumscribe us on every hand. The soul cir- 
cumscribes all things. As I have said, it contradicts 
all experience. In like manner it abolishes time and 
space. The influence of the senses has, in most men, 
overpowered the mind to that degree, that the walls 
of time and space have come to look real and insur- 
mountable ; and to speak with levity of these limits is, 
in the world, the sign of insanity. Yet time and 
space are but inverse measures of the force of the soul. 
The spirit sports with time, — 

" Can crowd eternity into an hour, 
Or stretch an hour to eternity," 

"VYe are often made to feel that there is another 
youth and age than that which is measured from the 
year of our natural birth. Some thoughts always find 
us young, and keep us so. Such a thought is the 
love of the universal and eternal beauty. Every man 
parts from that contemplation with the feeling that it 
rather belongs to ages than to mortal life. The least 
activity of the intellectual powers redeems us in a 
degree from the conditions of time. In sickness, in 
languor, give us a strain of poetry, or a profound sen- 
tence, and we are refreshed ; or produce a volume of 



214 i:SSAY IX. 

Plato, or Shakespeare, or remind us of their names, 
and instantly we come into a feeling of longevity. 
See how the deep, divine thought reduces centuries, 
and millenniums, and makes itself present through 
all ages. Is the teaching of Christ less effective now 
than it was when first his mouth was opened ? The 
emphasis of facts and persons in my thought has noth- 
ing to do with time. And so, always, the soul's scale 
is one ; the scale of the senses and the understanding 
is another. Before the revelations of the soul. Time, 
Space, and Nature shrink away. In common speech, 
we refer all things to time, as we habitually refer the 
immensely sundered stars to one concave sphere. 
And so we say that the Judgment is distant or near, 
that the Millennium approaches, that a day of certain 
political, moral, social reforms is at hand, and the 
like, when we mean, that, in the nature of things, one 
of the facts we contemplate is external and fugitive, 
and the other is permanent and connate with the soul. 
The things we now esteem fixed shall, one by one, 
detach themselves, like ripe fruit, from our experience, 
and fall. The wind shall blow them none knows 
whither. The landscape, the figures, Boston, London, 
are facts as fugitive as any institution past, or any 
whiff of mist or smoke, and so is society, and so is the 
world. The soul looketh steadily forwards, creating 
a world before her, leaving worlds behind her. She 
has no dates, nor rites, nor persons, nor special- 
ties, nor men. The soul knows only the soul; the 
web of events is the flowing robe in which she is 
clothed. 

After its own law and not by arithmetic is the rate of 



THE OVER-SOUL. 215 

its progress to be computed. The soul^s advances are 
not made by gradation, such as can be represented by 
motion in a straight line ; but rather by ascension of 
state, such as can be represented by metamorphosis, — 
from the QgQ to the worm, from the worm to the fly. 
The growths of genius are of a certain total character, 
that does not advance the elect individual first over John, 
then Adam, then Richard, and give to each the pain 
ef discovered inferiority, but by every throe of growth 
/ the man expands there where he works, passing, at 
each pulsation, classes, populations, of men. With 
each divine impulse the mind rends the thin rinds of 
the visible and finite, and comes out into eternity, and 
inspires and expires its air. It converses with truths 
that have always been spoken in the world, and be- 
comes conscious of a closer sympathy with Zeno and 
Arrian than with persons in the house. 

This is the law of moral and of mental gain. The 
simple rise as by specific levity, not into a particular 
virtue, but into the region of all the virtues. They are 
in the spirit which contains them all. The soul 
requires purity, but purity is not it ; requires justice, 
but justice is not that ; requires beneficence, but is 
somewhat better ; so that there is a kind of descent 
and accommodation felt when we leave speaking of 
moral nature, to urge a virtue which it enjoins. To 
the well-born child, all the virtues are natural, and 
not painfully acquired. Speak to his heart and the 
nian becomes suddenly virtuous. 

Within the same sentiment is the germ of intellect- 
ual growth, which obeys the same law. Those who 
are capable of humility, of justice, of love, of aspira- 



2i6 ESSAY IX. 

tion, stand already on a platform that commands the 
sciences and arts, speech and poetry, action and grace. 
For whoso dwells in this moral beatitude already an- 
ticipates those special powers which men prize so 
highly. The lover has no talent, no skill, which passes 
for quite nothing with his enamored maiden, however 
little she may possess of related faculty ; and the heart 
which abandons itself to the Supreme Mind finds itself 
related to all its works, and will travel a royal road 
to particular knowledges and powers. In ascending 
to this primary and aboriginal sentiment, we have 
come from our remote station on the circumference in- 
stantaneously to the centre of the world, where, as in 
the closet of God, we see causes, and anticipate the 
universe, which is but a slow effect. 

One mode of the divine teaching is the incarnation 
of the spirit in a form, — in forms, like my own. I 
live in society ; with persons who answer to thoughts 
in my own mind, or express a certain obedience to 
the great instincts to which I live. I see its presence 
to them. I am certified of a common nature; and 
these other souls, these separated selves, draw me as 
nothing else can. They stir in me the new emotions 
we call passion ; of love, hatred, fear, admiration, pity ; 
thence comes conversation, competition, persuasion, 
cities, and war. Persons are supplementary to the 
primary teaching of the soul. In youth we are mad 
for persons. Childhood and youth see all the world 
in them. But the larger experience of man discovers 
the identical nature appearing through them all. Per- 
sons themselves acquaint us with the impersonal. In 
all conversation between two persons, tacit reference is 



THE OVER-SOUL. 217 

made, as to a third party, to a common nature. That 
third party or common nature is not social ; it is im- 
personal ; is God. And so in groups where debate is 
earnest, and especially on high questions, the company 
become aware that the thought rises to an equal level 
in all bosoms, that all have a spiritual property in 
what was said, as well as the sayer. They all become 
wiser than they were. It arches over them like a tem- 
ple, this unity of thought, in which every heart beats 
with nobler sense of power and duty, and thinks and 
acts with unusual solemnity. All are conscious of at- 
taining to a higher self-possession. It shines for all. 
There is a certain wisdom of humanity which is com- 
mon to the greatest men with the lowest, and which 
our ordinary education often labors to silence and ob- 
struct. The mind is one ; and the best minds, who 
love truth for its own sake, think much less of prop- 
erty in truth. They accept it thankfully everywhere, 
and do not label or stamp it with any man's name, 
for it is theirs long beforehand, and from eternity. 
The learned and the studious of thought have no mo- 
nopoly of wisdom. Their violence of direction in 
some degree disqualifies them to think truly.. We owe 
many v^uable observations to people who are not very 
acute or profound, and who say the thing without 
effort, which we want and have long been hunting in 
vain. The action of the soul is oftener in that which 
is felt and left unsaid, than in that which is said in any 
conversation. It broods over every society, and they 
unconsciously seek for it in each other. We know 
better than we do. We do not yet possess ourselves, 
and we know at the same time that we are much more. 



21 8 ESSAY IX. 

I feel the same truth how often in my trivial conversa- 
tion with my neighbors, that somewhat higher in each 
of us overlooks this by-play, and Jove nods to Jove 
from behind each of us. 

Men descend to meet. In their habitual and mean 
service to the world, for which they forsake their na- 
tive nobleness, they resemble those Arabian sheiks, 
who dwell in mean houses, and affect an external pov- 
erty, to escape the rapacity of the Pacha, and reserve 
all their display of wealth for their interior and guard- 
ed retirements. 

As it is present in all persons, so it is in every 
period of life. It is adult already in the infant man. 
In my dealing with my child, my Latin and Greek, 
my accomplishments and my money, stead me noth- 
ing ; but as much soul as I have avails. If I am 
wilful, he sets his will against mine, one for one, and 
leaves me, if I please, the degradation of beating him 
by my superiority of strength. But if I renounce my 
will, and act for the soul, setting that up as umpire 
between us two, out of his young eyes looks the same 
soul ; he reveres and loves with me. 

The soul is the perceiver and revealer of truth. 
We know truth when we see it, let sceptic a^jjd scoffer 
say what they choose. Foolish people ask you, when 
3^ou have spoken what they do not wish to hear, 
"How do you know it is truth, and not an error of 
your own ? " We know truth when we see it, from 
opinion, as we know when we are awake that we are 
awake. It was a grand sentence of Emanuel Swe- 
denborg, which would alone indicate the greatness of 
that man's perception, — " It is no proof of a man's 



THE OVER-SOUL. 219 

understanding to be able to confirm whatever he 
pleases ; but to be able to discern that what is true is 
true, and that what is false is false, this is the mark 
and character of intelligence." In the book I read, 
the good thought returns to me, as every truth will, 
the image of the whole soul. To the bad thought 
which I find in it, the same soul becomes a discerning, 
separating sword, and lops it away. We are wiser 
than we know. If we will not interfere with our 
/thought, but will act entirely, or see how the thing 
stands in God, we know the particular thing, and 
every thing, and every man. For the Maker of all 
things and all persons stands behind us, and casts his 
dread omniscience through us over things. 

But beyond this recognition of its own in particular 
passages of the individuars experience, it also reveals 
truth. And here we should seek to reinforce our- 
selves by its very presence, and to speak with a wor- 
thier, loftier strain of that advent. For the soul's 
communication of truth is the highest event in nature, 
since it then does not give somewhat from itself, but 
it gives itself, or passes into and becomes that man 
whom it enlightens ; or, in proportion to that truth he 
receives, it takes him to itself. 

We distinguish the announcements of the soul, its 
manifestations of its own nature, by the term Revela- 
tion. These are always attended by the emotion of 
the sublime. For this communication is an influx of 
the Divine mind into our mind. It is an ebb of the 
individual rivulet before the flowing surges of the sea 
of life. Every distinct apprehension of this central 
commandment agitates men with awe and delight. A 



220 ESSAY IX. 

thrill passes through all men at the reception of new 
truth, or at the performance of a great action, which 
comes out of the heart of nature. In these communi- 
cations, the power to see is not separated from the 
will to do, but the insight proceeds from obedience, 
and the obedience proceeds from a joyful perception. 
Every moment when the individual feels himself invad- 
ed by it is memorable. By the necessity of our con- 
stitution, a certain enthusiasm attends the individual's 
consciousness of that divine presence. The character 
and duration of this enthusiasm varies with the state 
of the individual, from an ecstasy and trance and pro- 
phetic inspiration, — which is its rarer appearance, — 
to the faintest glow of virtuous emotion, in which form 
it warms, like our household fires, all the families 
and associations of men, and makes society possible. 
A certain tendency to insanity has always attended 
the opening of the religious sense in men, as if they 
had been " blasted with excess of light." The trances 
of Socrates, the " union " of Plotinus, the vision of 
Porphyry, the conversion of Paul, the aurora of Beh- 
men, the convulsions of George Fox and his Quak- 
ers, the illumination of Swedenborg, are of this kind. 
What was in the case of these remarkable persons a 
ravishment has, in innumerable instances in common 
life, been exhibited in less striking manner. Every- 
where the history of religion betrays a tendency to en- 
thusiasm. The rapture of the Moravian and Quietist ; 
the opening of the internal sense of the Word, in the 
language of the New Jerusalem Church; the revival 
of the Calvinistic churches ; the experiences of the Meth- 
odists, are varying forms of that shudder of awe and 



THE OVER-SOUL, 221 

delight with which the individual soul always mingles 
with the universal soul. 

The nature of these revelations is the same ; they 
are perceptions of the absolute law. They are solu- 
tions of the souFs own questions. They do not an- 
swer the questions which the understanding asks. 
The soul answers never by words, but by the thing 
itself that is inquired after. 

^Revelation is the disclosure of the soul. The pop- 
ular notion of a revelation is, that it is a telling of 
fortunes. In past oracles of the soul, the understand- 
ing seeks to find answers to sensual questions, and 
undertakes to tell from God how long men shall exist, 
what their hands shall do, and who shall be their com- 
pany, adding names, and dates, and places. But we 
must pick no locks. We must check this low curios- 
ity. An answer in words is delusive ; it is really no 
answer to the questions you ask. Do not require a 
description of the countries towards which you sail. 
The description does not describe them to you, and to- 
morrow you arrive there, and know them by inhabit- 
ing them. Men ask concerning the immortality of the 
soul, the employments of heaven, the state of th^ sin- 
ner, and so forth. They even dream that Jesus has 
left replies to precisely these interrogatories. Never a 
moment did that sublime spirit speak in their patois. 
To truth, j ustice, love, the attributes of the soul, the 
idea of immutableness is essentially associated. Jesus, 
living in these moral sentiments, heedless of sensual 
fortunes, heeding only the manifestations of these, 
never made the separation of the idea of duration 
from the essence of these attributes, nor uttered a syl- 



222 ESSAY IX, 

lable concerning the duration of the soul. It was left 
to his disciples to sever duration from the moral ele- 
ments, and to teach the immortality of the soul as a 
doctrine, and maintain it by evidences. The moment 
the doctrine of the immortality is separately taught, 
man is already fallen. In the flowing of love, in the 
adoration of humility, there is no question of continu- 
ance. No inspired man ever asks this question, or 
condescends to these evidences. For the soul is true 
to itself, and the man in whom it is shed abroad can- 
not wander from the present, which is infinitCj to a 
future which would be finite. 

These questions which we lust to ask about the 
future are a confession of sin. God has no answer for 
them. No answer in words can reply to a question 
of things. It is not in an arbitrary " decree of God," 
but in the nature of man, that a veil shuts down on 
the facts of to-morrow ; for the soul will not have us 
read any other cipher than that of cause and effect. 
By this veil, which curtains events, it instructs the 
children of men to live in to-day. The only mode of 
obtaining an answer to these questions of the senses is 
to forego all low curiosity, and, accepting the tide of 
being which floats us into the secret of nature, work 
and live, work and live, and all unawares the advan- 
cing soul has built and forged for itself a new condi- 
tion, and the question and the answer are one. 

By the same fire, vital, consecrating, celestial, which 
burns until it shall dissolve all things into the waves 
and surges of an ocean of light, we see and know 
each other, and what spirit each is of. Who can tell 
the grounds of his knowledge of the character of the 



THE OVER-SOUL. 223 

several individuals in his circle of friends ? No man. 
Yet their acts and words do not disappoint him. In 
that man, though he knew no ill of him, he put no 
trust. In that other, though they had seldom met, 
authentic signs had yet passed, to signify that he 
might be trusted as one who had an interest in his 
own character. We know each other very well, — 
w^hich of us has been just to himself, and whether that 
which we teach or behold is only an aspiration, or is 
^our honest effort also. 

We are all discerners of spirits. That diagnosis 
lies aloft in our life or unconscious power. The in- 
tercourse of society, — its trade, its religion, its friend- 
ships, its quarrels, — is one wide, judicial investigation 
of character. In full court, or in small committee, or 
confronted face to face, accuser and accused, men 
offer themselves to be judged. Against their will 
they exhibit those decisive trifles by which character 
is read. But who judges ? and what ? Not our un- 
derstanding. We do not read them by learning or 
craft. No; the wisdom of the wise man consists 
herein, that he does not judge them ; he lets them 
judge themselves, and merely reads and records their 
own verdict. 

By virtue of this inevitable nature, private will is 
overpowered, and, maugre our efforts or our imperfec- 
tions, your genius will speak from you, and mine from 
me. That which we are, we shall teach, not volunta- 
rily, but involuntarily. Thoughts come into our 
minds by avenues which we never left open, and 
thoughts go out of our minds through avenues which 
we never voluntarily opened. Character teaches over 



224 ESSAY IX. 

our head. The infallible index of true progress is 
found in the tone the man takes. Neither his age, 
nor his breeding, nor company, nor books, nor actions, 
nor talents, nor all together, can hinder him from be- 
ing deferential to a higher spirit than his own. If he 
have not found his home in God, his manners, his 
forms of speech, the turn of his sentences, the build, 
shall I say, of all his opinions, will involuntarily con- 
fess it, let him brave it out how he will. If he have 
found his centre, the Deity will shine through him, 
through all the disguises of ignorance, of ungenial 
temperament, of unfavorable circumstance. The tone 
of seeking is one, and the tone of having is an- 
other. 

The great distinction between teachers sacred or 
literary, — between poets like Herbert, and poets like 
Pope, — between philosophers like Spinoza, Kant, and 
Coleridge, and philosophers like Locke, Paley, Mack- 
intosh, and Stewart, — between men of the world, who 
are reckoned accomplished talkers, and here and there 
a fervent mystic, prophesying, half insane under the 
infinitude of his thought, — is, that one class speak 
from within, or from experience, as parties and pos- 
sessors of the fact ; and the other class, from without, 
as spectators merely, or perhaps as acquainted with 
the fact on the evidence of third persons. It is of no 
use to preach to me from without. I can do that too 
easily myself. Jesus speaks always from wdthin, and 
in a degree that transcends all others. In that is the 
miracle. I believe beforehand that it ought so to be. 
All men stand continually in the expectation of the 
appearance of such a teacher. But if a man do not 



THE OVER-SOUL. 225 

speak from within the veil, where the word is one with 
that it tells of, let him lowly confess it. 

The same Omniscience flows into the intellect, and 
makes what we call genius. Much of the wisdom of 
the world is not wisdom, and the most illuminated 
class of men are no doubt superior to literary fame, 
and are not writers. Among the multitude of schol- 
ars and authors, we feel no hallowing presence; we 
are sensible of a knack and skill rather than of in- 
spiration ; they have a light, and know not whence it 
comes, and call it their own ; their talent is some ex- 
aggerated faculty, some overgrown member, so that 
their strength is a disease. In these instances the in- 
tellectual gifts do not make the impression of virtue, 
but almost of vice ; and we feel that a man's talents 
stand in the way of his advancement in truth. But 
genius is religious. It is a larger imbibing of the 
common heart. It is not anomalous, but more like 
and not less like other men. There is, in all great 
poets, a wisdom of humanity which is superior to any 
talents they exercise. The author, the wit, the parti- 
san, the fine gentleman, does not take place of the 
man. Humanity shines in Homer, in Chaucer, in 
Spenser, in Shakespeare, in Milton. They are con- 
tent with truth. They use the positive degree. They 
jieem frigid and phlegmatic to those who have been 
spiced with the frantic passion and violent coloring of 
inferior, but popular writers. For they are poets by 
he free course which they allow to the informing soul, 
rhich through their eyes beholds again, and blesses 
,he things which it hath made. The soul is superior 
to its knowledge ; wiser than any of its works. The 



226 ESSAY IX. 

great poet makes us feel our own wealth, and then we 
think less of his compositions. His best communica- 
tion to our mind is to teach us to despise all he has 
done. Shakespeare carries us to such a loftj strain of 
intelligent activity, as to suggest a wealth which beg- 
gars his own; and we then feel that the splendid 
works which he has created, and which in other hours 
we extol as a sort of self-existent poetry, take no 
stronger hold of real nature than the shadow of a pass- 
ing traveller on the rock. The inspiration which ut- 
tered itself in Hamlet and Lear could utter things as 
good from day to day for ever. Why, then, should I 
make account of Hamlet and Lear, as if we had not 
the soul from which they fell as syllables from the 
tongue ? 

This energy does not descend into individual life 
on any other condition than entire possession. It 
comes to the lowly and simple ; it comes to whomso- 
ever will put off what is foreign and proud ; it comes 
as insight ; it comes as serenity and grandeur. When 
we see those whom it inhabits, we are apprised of new 
degrees of greatness. From that inspiration the man 
comes back with a changed tone. He does not talk 
with men with an eye to their opinion. He tries them. 
It requires of us to be plain and true. The vain trav- 
eller attempts to embellish his life by quoting my lord, 
and the prince, and the countess, who thus said or did 
to him. The ambitious vulgar show you their spoons, 
and brooches, and rings, and preserve their cards and 
compliments. The more cultivated, in their account 
of their own experience, cull out the pleasing, poetic 
circumstance, — the visit to Kome, the man of genius 



THE OVER-SOUL. 227 

tliey saw, the brilliant friend they know ; still further 
on, perhaps, the gorgeous landscape, the mountain 
lights, the mountain thoughts, they enjoyed yesterday, 
— and so seek to throw a romantic color over their 
life. But the soul that ascends to worship the great 
God is plain and true; has no rose-color, no fine 
friends, no chivalry, no adventures ; does not want 
admiration ; dwells in the hour that now is, in the 
earnest experience of the common day, — by reason of 
the present moment and the mere trifle having become 
porous to thought, and bibulous of the sea of light. 

Converse with a mind that is grandly simple, and 
literature looks like word-catching. The simplest 
utterances are worthiest to be written, yet are they so 
cheap, and so things of course, that, in the infinite 
riches of the soul, it is like gathering a few pebbles off 
the ground, or bottling a little air in a phial, when the 
whole earth and the whole atmosphere are ours. 
Nothing can pass there, or make you one of the circle, 
but the casting aside your trappings, and dealing man 
to man in naked truth, plain confession, and omnis- 
cient affirmation. 

Souls such as these treat you as gods would ; walk 
as gods in the earth, accepting without any admira- 
tion your wit, your bounty, your virtue even, — say 
rather your act of duty, for your virtue they own as 
their proper blood, royal as themselves, and over-royal, 
and the father of the gods. But what rebuke their 
plain fraternal bearing casts on the mutual flattery 
with which authors solace each other and wound them- 
selves ! These flatter not. I do not wonder that these 
men go to see Cromwell, and Christina, and Charles 



228 ESSAY IX, 

the Second, and James the First, and the Grand Turk. 
For they are, in their own elevation, the fellows of 
kings, and must feel the servile tone of conversation 
in the world. They must always be a godsend to 
, princes, for they confront them, a king to a king, 
without ducking or concession, and give a high nature 
the refreshment and satisfaction of resistance, of plain 
humanity, of even companionship, and of new ideas. 
They leave them wiser and superior men. Souls like 
these make us feel that sincerity is more excellent than 
flattery. Deal so plainly with man and woman, as to 
constrain the utmost sincerity, and destroy all hope of 
trifling with you. It is the highest compliment you 
can pay. Their " highest praising,*' said Milton, " is 
not flattery, and their plainest advice is a kind of 
praising.'' 

Ineffable is the union of man and God in every act 
of the soul. The simplest person, who in his integ- 
rity worships God, becomes God ; yet for ever and 
ever the influx of this better and universal self is new 
and unsearchable. It inspires awe and astonishment. 
How dear, how soothing to man, arises the idea of 
God, peopling the lonely place, effacing the scars of 
our mistakes and disappointments ! When we have 
broken our god of tradition, and ceased from our god 
of rhetoric, then may God fire the heart with his pres- 
ence. It is the doubling of the heart itself, nay, the 
infinite enlargement of the heart with a power of growth 
to a new infinity on every side. It inspires in man an 
infallible trust. He has not the conviction, but the 
sight, that the best is the true, and may in that thought 
easily dismiss all particular uncertainties and fears, 



THE OVER-SOUL, 229 

and adjourn to the sure revelation of time, the solution 
of his private riddles. He is sure that his welfare is 
dear to the heart of being. In the presence of law to 
his mind, he is overflowed with a reliance so universal, 
that it sweeps away all cherished hopes and the most 
stable projects of mortal condition in its flood. He 
believfes that he cannot escape from his good. The 
things that are really for thee gravitate to thee. You 
are running to seek your friend. Let your feet ran, 
but your mind need not. If you do not find him, 
will you not acquiesce that it is best you should not 
find him 7 for there is a power, which, as it is in you, 
is in him also, and could therefore very well bring you 
together, if it were for the best. You are preparing 
with eagerness to go and render a service to which 
your talent and your taste invite you, the love of men 
and the hope of fame. Has it not occurred to you, 
that you have no right to go, unless you are equally 
willing to be prevented from going ? O, believe, as 
thou livest, that every sound that is spoken over the 
round world, which thou oughtest to hear, will vibrate 
on thine ear ! Every proverb, every book, every by- 
word that belongs to thee for aid or comfort shall 
surely come home through open or winding passages. 
Every friend whom not thy fantastic will, but the 
great and tender heart in thee craveth, shall lock thee 
in his embrace. And this, because the heart in thee 
is the heart of all ; not a valve, not a wall, not an in- 
tersection is there anywhere in nature, but one blood 
rolls uninterruptedly an endless circulation through 
all men, as the water of the globe is all one sea, and, 
truly seen, its tide is one. 



230 ESSAY IX. 

Let man, then, learn the revelation of all nature 
and all thought to his heart ; this, namely : that the 
Highest dwells with him ; that the sources of nature 
are in his own mind, if the sentiment of duty is there. 
But if he would know what the great God speaketh, 
he must " go into his closet and shut the door," as 
Jesus said. God will not make himself manifest to 
cowards. He must greatly listen to himself, with- 
drawing himself from all the accents of other men's 
devotion. Even their prayers are hurtful to him, 
until he have made his own. Our religion vulgarly 
stands on numbers of believers. Whenever the ap- 
peal is made — no matter how indirectly — to num- 
bers, proclamation is then and there made, that relig- 
ion is not. He that finds God a sweet, enveloping 
thought to him never counts his company. When I 
sit in that presence, who shall dare to come in ? 
When I rest in perfect humility, when I burn with 
pure love, what can Calvin or Swedenborg say ? 

It makes no difference whether the appeal is to 
numbers or to one. The faith that stands on author- 
ity is not faith. The reliance on authority measures 
the decline of religion, the withdrawal of the soul. 
The position men have given to Jesus, now for many 
centuries of history, is a position of authority. It 
characterizes themselves. It cannot alter the eternal 
facts. Great is the soul, and plain. It is no flatterer, 
it is no follower; it never appeals from itself It 
believes in itself. Before the immense possibilities of 
man, all mere experience, all past biography, however 
spotless and sainted, shrinks away. Before that 
heaven which our presentiments foreshow us, we can- 



THE OVER-SOUL. 231 

not easily praise any form of life we have seen or 
read of. We not only affirm that we have few great 
men, but, absolutely speaking, that we have none ; 
that we have no history, no record of any character 
or mode of living, that entirely contents us. The 
saints and demigods whom history worships we are 
constrained to accept with a grain of allowance. 
Though in our lonely hours we draw a new 
strength out of their memory, yet, pressed on our 
attention, as they are by the thoughtless and custom- 
ary, they fatigue and invade. The soul gives itself, * 
alone, original, and pure, to the Lonely, Original, and 
Pure, who, on that condition, gladly inhabits, leads, 
and speaks through it. Then is it glad, young, and 
nimble. It is not wise, but it sees through all things. 
It is not called religious, but it is innocent. It calls 
the light its own, and feels that the grass grows and 
the stone falls by a law inferior to, and dependent on, 
its nature. Behold, it saith, I am born into the great, 
the universal mind. I, the imperfecf, adore my own 
Perfect. I am somehow receptive of the great soul, 
and thereby I do overlook the sun and the stars, and 
feel them to be the fair accidents and effects which 
change and pass. More and more the surges of ever- 
lasting nature enter into me, and I become public and 
human in my regards and actions. So come I to live 
in thoughts, and act with energies, which are immor- 
tal. Thus revering the soul, and learning, as the an- 
cient said, that *'its beauty is immense," man will 
come to see that the world is the perennial miracle 
which the soul worketh, and be less astonished at 
particular wonders ; he will learn that there is no pro- 



232 ESSAY IX, 

fane history ; that all history is sacred ; that the uni- 
verse is represented in an atom, in a moment of time. 
He will weave no longer a spotted life of shreds and 
patches, but he will live with a divine unity. He will 
cease from what is base and frivolous in his life, and 
be content with all places and with any service he can 
render. He will calmly front the morrow in the neg- 
ligency of that trust which carries God with it, and 
so hath already the whole future in the bottom of the 
heart. 



C I E C L E S 



Nature centres into balls, 
And her proud ephemerals, 
Fast to surface and outside, 
Scan the profile of the sphere 5 
Knew they what that signified, 
A new genesis were here. 



ESSAY X. 



CIRCLES 




ijHE eye is the first circle ; the horizon which 
it forms is the second ; and throughout na- 
ture this primary figure is repeated without 
end. It is the highest emblem in the cipher 
of the world. St. Augustine described the nature of 
God as a circle whose centre was everywhere, and its 
circumference nowhere. We are all our lifetime read- 
ing the copious sense of this first of forms. One 
moral we have already deduced, in considering the 
circular or compensatory character of every human 
action. Another analogy we shall now trace; that 
every action admits of being outdone. Our life is an 
apprenticeship to the truth, that around every circle 
another can be drawn ; that there is no end in na- 
ture, but every end is a beginning ; that there is al- 
ways another dawn risen on mid-noon, and under 
every deep a lower deep opens. 

This fact, as far as it symbolizes the moral fact of 
the Unattainable, the flying Perfect, around which the 
hands of man can never meet, at once the inspirer 
and the condemner of every success, may conveniently 
serve us to connect many illustrations of human 
power in every department. 



236 ESSAY X. 

There are no fixtures in nature. The universe is 
fluid and volatile. Permanence is but a word of de- 
grees. Our globe seen by God is a transparent law, 
not a mass of facts. The law dissolves the fact and 
holds it fluid. Our culture is the predominance of 
an idea which draws after it this train of cities and 
institutions. Let us rise into another idea : they will 
disappear. The Greek sculpture is all melted away, 
as if it had been statues of ice ; here and there a sol- 
itary figure or fragment remaining, as we see flecks 
and scraps of snow left in cold dells and mountain 
clefts, in June and July. For the genius that created 
it creates now somewhat else. The Greek letters last 
a little longer, but are already passing under the same 
sentence, and tumbling into the inevitable pit which 
the creation of new thought opens for all that is old. 
The new continents are built out of the ruins of an 
old planet ; the new races fed out of the decomposi- 
tion of the foregoing. New arts destroy the old. See 
the investment of capital in aqueducts made useless 
by hydraulics ; fortifications, by gunpowder ; roads 
and canals, by railways ; sails, by steam ; steam, by 
electricity. 

You admire this tower of granite, weathering the 
hurts of so many ages. Yet a little waving hand 
built this huge wall, and that which builds is better 
than that which is built. The hand that built can 
topple it down much faster. Better than the hand, 
and nimbler, was the invisible thought which wrought 
through it ; and thus ever, behind the coarse effect, is 
a fine cause, which, being narrowly seen, is itself the 
effect of a finer cause. Everything looks permanent 



CIRCLES. 237 

until its secret is known. A rich estate appears to 
women a firm and lasting fact; to a merchant, one 
easily created out of any materials, and easily lost. 
An orchard, good tillage, good grounds, seem a fixture, 
like a gold mine, or a river, to a citizen; but to a 
large farmer, not much more fixed than the state of 
the crop. Nature looks provokingly stable and secu- 
lar, but it has a cause like all the rest; and when 
once I comprehend that, will these fields stretch so 
immovably wide, these leaves hang so individually 
considerable? Permanence is a word of degrees. 
Everything is medial. Moons are no more bounds to 
spiritual power than bat-balls. 

The key to every man is his thought. Sturdy and 
defying though he look, he has a helm which he obeys, 
which is the idea after which all his facts are classified. 
He can only be reformed by showing him a new idea 
which commands his own. The life of man is a self- 
evolving circle, which, from a ring imperceptibly small, 
rushes on all sides outwards to new and larger circles, 
and that without end. The extent to which this gen- 
eration of circles, wheel without wheel, will go, depends 
on the force or truth of the individual soul. For it is 
the inert effort of each thought, having formed itself 
into a cii;cular wave of circumstance, — as, for instance, 
an empire, rules of an art, a local usage, a religious 
rite, — to heap itself on that ridge, and to solidify and 
hem in the life. But if the soul is quick and strong, 
it bursts over that boundary on all sides, and expands 
another orbit on the great deep, which also runs up 
into a high wave, with attempt again to stop and to 
■ bind. But the heart refuses to be imprisoned ; in its 



238 ESSAY X. 

first and narrowest pulses, it already tends outward 
with a vast force, and to immense and innumerable 
expansions. 

Every ultimate fact is only the first of a new series. 
Every general law only a particular fact of some more 
general law presently to disclose itself There is no 
outside, no inclosing wall, no circumference to us. 
The man finishes his story, — how good ! how final 1 
how it puts a new face on all things ! He fills the 
sky. Lo ! on the other side rises also a man, and 
draws a circle around the circle we had just pro- 
nounced the outline of the sphere. Then already is 
our first speaker not man, but only a first speaker. 
His only redress is forthwith to draw 'a circle outside 
of his antagonist. And so men do by themselves. 
The result of to-day, which haunts the mind and can- 
not be escaped, will presently be abridged into a word, 
and the principle that seemed to explain nature will 
itself be included as one example of a bolder general- 
ization. In the thought of to-morrow there is a power 
to upheave all thy creed, all the creeds, all the litera- 
tures, of the nations, and marshal thee to a heaven 
which no epic dream has yet depicted. Every man is 
not so much a workman in the world, as he is a sug- 
gestion of that he should be. Men walk as prophecies 
of the next age. 

Step by step we scale this mysterious ladder : the 
steps are actions ; the new prospect is power. Every 
several result is threatened and judged by that which 
follows. Every one seems to be contradicted by the 
new ; it is only limited by the new. The new state- 
ment is always hated by the old, and, to those dwell- 



CIRCLES. 239 

ing in the old, comes like an abyss of scepticism. 
But the eye soon gets wonted to it, for the eye and 
it are effects of one cause; then its innocency and 
benefit appear, and presently, all its energy spent, 
it pales and dwindles before the revelation of the new 
hour. 

Fear not the new generalization. Does the fact 
look crass and material, threatening to degrade thy 
theory of spirit ? Resist it not ; it goes to refine and 
raise thy theory of matter just as much. 

There are no fixtures to men, if we appeal to con- 
sciousness. Every man supposes himself not to be 
fully understood; and if there is any truth in him, 
if he rests at last on the divine soul, I see not how it 
can be otherwise. The last chamber, the last closet, 
he must feel, was never opened ; there is always a 
residuum unknown, unanalyzable. That is, every man 
believes that he has a greater possibility. 

Our moods do not believe in each other. To-day 
1 am full of thoughts, and can write what I please. 
I see no reason why I should not have the same 
thought, the same power of expression, to-morrow. 
What I write, whilst I write it, seems the most nat- 
ural thing in the world ; but yesterday I saw a dreary 
vacuity in this direction in which now I see so much ; 
and a month hence, I doubt not, I shall wonder who 
he was that wrote so many continuous pages. Alas 
for this infirm faith, this will not strenuous, this vast 
ebb of a vast flow ! I am God in nature ; I am a 
weed by the wall. 

The continual effort to raise himself above himself, 
to work a pitch above his last height, betrays itself in 



240 ESSAY X. 

a man's relations. We thirst for approbation, yet 
cannot forgive the approver. The sweet of nature is 
love ; yet, if I have a friend, I am tormented by my 
imperfections. The love of me accuses the other 
party. If he were high enough to slight me, then 
could I love him, and rise by my affection to new 
heights. A man's growth is seen in the successive 
choirs of his friends. For every friend whom he loses 
for truth, he gains a better. I thought, as I walked 
in the woods and mused on my friends, why should I 
play with them this game of idolatry ? I know and 
see too well, when not voluntarily blind, the speedy 
limits of persons called high and worthy. Rich, no- 
ble, and great they are by the liberality of our speech, 
but truth is sad. O blessed Spirit, whom I forsake for 
these, they are not thou ! Every personal considera- 
tion that we allow costs us heavenly state. We sell 
the thrones of angels for a short and turbulent plea- 
sure. 

How often must we learn this lesson ? Men cease 
to interest us when we find their limitations. The 
only sin is limitation. As soon as you once come up 
with a man's limitations, it is all over with him. Has 
he talents ? has he enterprise ? has he knowledge 1 
it boots not. Infinitely alluring and attractive was 
he to you yesterday, a great hope, a sea to swim in ; 
now, you have found his shores, found it a pond, and 
you care not if you never see it again. 

Each new step we take in thought reconciles twenty 
seemingly discordant facts, as expressions of one law. 
Aristotle and Plato are reckoned the respective heads 
of two schools. A wise man will see that Aristotle Pla- 



CIRCLES. 241 

Ionizes. By going one step farther back in thought, 
discordant opinions are reconciled, by being seen to 
be two extremes of one principle, and we can never 
go so far back as to preclude a still higher vision. 

Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on 
this planet. Then all things are at risk. It is as 
when a conflagration has broken out in a great city, 
and no man knows what is safe, or where it will end. 
There is not a piece of science, but its flank may be 
turned to-morrow ; there is not any literary reputa- 
tion, not the so-called eternal names of fame, that may 
not be revised and condemned. The very hopes of 
man, the thoughts of his heart, the religion of nations, 
the manners and morals of mankind, are all at the 
mercy of a new generalization. Generalization is al- 
ways a new influx of the divinity into the mind. 
Hence the thrill that attends it. 

Yalor consists in the power of self-recovery, so 
that a man cannot have his flank turned, cannot be 
out-gener ailed, but put him where you will, he stands. 
This can only be by his preferring truth to his past 
apprehension of truth ; and his alert acceptance of it, 
from whatever quarter ; the intrepid conviction that his 
laws, his relations to society, his Christianity, his 
world may at any time be superseded and decease. 

There are degrees in idealism. We learn first to 
play with it academically, as the magnet was once a 
toy. Then we see in the heyday of youth and poetry 
that it may be true, that it is true in gleams and frag- 
ments. Then, its countenance waxes stern and grand, 
and we see that it must be true. It now shows itself 
ethical and practical. We learn that God is; that 
16 



242 ESSAY X. 

he is in me; and that all things are shadows of 
him. The idealism of Berkeley is only a crude state- 
ment of the idealism of Jesus, and that again is a crude 
statement of the fact, that all nature is the rapid efflux 
of goodness executing and organizing itself. Much 
more obviously is history and the state of the world at 
any one time directly dependent on the intellectual 
classification then existing in the minds of men. The 
things which are dear to men at this hour are so on 
account of the ideas which have emerged on their men- 
tal horizon, and which cause the present order of 
things as a tree bears its apples. A new degree of 
culture would instantly revolutionize the entire system 
of human pursuits. 

Conversation is a game of circles. In conversation 
we pluck up the termini which bound the common of 
silence on every side. The parties are not to be judged 
by the spirit they partake and even express under this 
Pentecost. To-morrow they will have receded from 
this high-water mark. To-morrow you shall find them 
stooping under the old pack-saddles. Yet let us enjoy 
the cloven flame whilst it glows on our walls. When 
each new speaker strikes a new light, emancipates us 
from the oppression of the last speaker, to oppress us 
with the greatness and exclusiveness of his own 
thought, then yields us to another redeemer, we seem 
to recover our rights, to become men. 0, what truths 
profound and executable only in ages and orbs are 
supposed in the announcement of every truth ! In 
common hours, society sits cold and statuesque. We 
all stand waiting, empty, — knowing, possibly, that 
we can be fu^U, surrqunde^ by mighty symtbpls which 



CIRCLES. 243 

are not symbols to us, but prose and trivial toys. 
Then cometh the god, and converts the statues into 
fiery men, and by a flash of his eye burns up the veil 
which shrouded all things, and the meaning of the 
very furniture, of cup and saucer, of chair and clock 
and tester, is manifest. The facts which loomed so 
large in the fogs of yesterday — property, climate, 
breeding, personal beauty, and the like — have strange- 
ly changed their proportions. All that we reckoned 
settled shakes and rattles ; and literatures, cities, cli- 
mates, religions, leave their foundations, and dance 
before our eyes. And yet here again see the swift cir- 
cumspection ! Good as is discourse, silence is better, 
and shames it. The length of the discourse indicates 
the distance of thought betwixt the speaker and the 
hearer. If they were at a perfect understanding in 
any part, no words would be necessary thereon. If at 
one in all parts, no words would be suffered. 

Literature is a point outside of our hodiernal circle, 
through which a new one may be described. The use 
of literature is to afford us a platform whence we may 
command a view of our present life, a purchase by 
which we may move it. We fill ourselves with an- 
cient learning, install ourselves the best we can in 
Greek, in Punic, in Roman houses, only that we may 
wiselier see French, English, and American houses 
and modes of living. In like manner, we see litera- 
ture best from the midst of wild nature, or from the 
din of affairs, or from a high religion. The field can- 
not be well seen from within the field. The astrono- 
mer must have his diameter of the earth's orbit as a 
base to find the parallax of any star. 



244 ESSAY X 

Therefore we value the poet. All the argument 
and all the wisdom is not in the encyclopaedia, or the 
treatise on metaphysics, or the Body of Divinity, but 
in the sonnet or the play. In my daily work I incline 
to repeat my old steps, and do not believe in remedial 
force, in the power of change and reform But some 
Petrarch or Ariosto, filled with the new wine of his 
imagination, 'writes me an ode or a brisk romance, full 
of daring thought and action. He smites and arouses 
me with his shrill tones, breaks up my whole chain 
of habits, and I open my eye on my own possibilities. 
He claps wings to the sides of all the solid old lumber 
of the world, and I am capable once more of choosing 
a straight path in theory and practice. 

We have the same need to command a view of the 
religion of the world. We can never see Christianity 
from the catechism : — from the pastures, from a boat 
in the pond, from amidst the songs of wood-birds, we 
possibly may. Cleansed by the elemental light and 
wind, steeped in the sea of beautiful forms which the 
field offers us, we may chance to cast a right glance 
back upon biography. Christianity is rightly dear to 
the best of mankind ; yet was there never a young 
philosopher whose breeding had fallen into the Chris- 
tian Church, by whom that brave text of Paul's was 
not specially prized : — " Then shall also the Son be 
subject unto Him who put all things under him, that 
God may be all in all.'* Let the claims and virtues 
of persons be never so great and welcome, the instinct 
of man presses eagerly onward to the impersonal and 
illimitable, and gladly arms itself against the dogma- 
tism of bigots with this generous word out of the book 
itself. 



CIRCLES. 245 

The natural world may be conceived of as a system 
of concentric circles, and we now and then detect in 
nature slight dislocations, which apprise us that this 
surface on which we now stand is not fixed, but 
sliding. These manifold tenacious qualities, this chem- 
istry and vegetation, these metals and animals, which 
seem to stand there for their own sake, are means and 
methods only, — are words of God, and as fugitive as 
other words. Has the naturalist or chemist learned 
his craft, who has explored the gravity of atoms and 
the elective affinities, who has not yet discerned the 
deeper law whereof this is only a partial or approx- 
imate statement, namely, that like draws to like ; and 
that the goods which belong to you gravitate to you 
and need not be pursued with pains and cost ? Yet 
is that statement approximate also, and not final. 
Omnipresence is a higher fact. Not through subtle, 
subterranean channels need friend and fact be drawn 
to their counterpart, but, rightly considered, these 
things proceed from the eternal generation of the soul. 
Cause and effect are two sides of one fact. 

The same law of eternal procession ranges all that 
we call the virtues, and extinguishes each in the light 
of a better. The great man will not be prudent in 
the popular sense ; all his prudence will be so much 
deduction from his grandeur. But it behooves each 
to see, when he sacrifices prudence, to what God he 
devotes it ; if to ease and pleasure, he had better be 
prudent still ; if to a great trust, he can well spare 
his mule and panniers who has a winged chariot in- 
stead. Geoffrey draws on his boots to go through 
the woods, that his feet may be safer from the bite of 



246 ESSAY X. 

snakes ; Aaron never thinks of such a peril. In 
many years neither is harmed by such an accident. 
Yet it seems to me, that, with every precaution you 
take against such an evil, you put yourself into the 
power of the evil. I suppose that the highest pru- 
dence is the lowest prudence. Is this too sudden a 
rushing from the centre to the verge of our orbit? 
Think how many times we shall fall back into pitiful 
calculations before we take up our rest in the great 
sentiment, or make the verge of to-day the new cen- 
tre. Besides, your bravest sentiment is familiar to 
the humblest men. The poor and the low have their 
way of expressing the last facts of philosophy as well 
as you. " Blessed be nothing," and " the worse 
things are, the better they are," are proverbs which 
express the transcendentalism of common life. 

One man's justice is another's injustice ; one man's 
beauty, another's ugliness ; one man's wisdom, an- 
other's folly ; as one beholds the same objects from a 
higher point. One man thinks justice consists in pay- 
ing debts, and has no measure in his abhorrence of 
another who is very remiss in this duty, and makes 
the creditor wait tediously. But that second man 
has his own way of looking at things ; asks himself 
which debt must I pay first, the debt to the rich, or 
the debt to the poor ? the debt of money, or the debt 
of thought to mankind, of genius to nature? For 
you, broker ! there is no other principle but arith- 
metic. For me, commerce is of trivial import; love, 
faith, truth of character, the aspiration of man, these 
are sacred ; nor can I detach one duty, like you, from 
all other duties, and concentrate my forces mechan- 



CIRCLES. 247 

ically on the payment of moneys. Let me live on- 
ward ; you shall find that, though slower, the progress 
of my character will liquidate all these debts without 
injustice to higjier claims. If a man should dedicate 
himself to the payment of notes, would not this be in- 
justice? Does he owe no debt but money'? And 
are all claims on him to be postponed to a landlord's 
or a banker's ? 

There is no virtue which is final ; all are initial. 
The virtues of society are vices of the saint. The ter- 
ror of reform is the discovery that we must cast away 
our virtues, or what we have always esteemed such, 
into the same pit that has consumed our grosser vices. 

" Forgive his crimes, forgive his virtues too, 
Those smaller faults, half converts to the right." 

It is the highest power of divine moments that they 
abolish our contritions also. I accuse myself of sloth 
and unprofitableness day by day ; but when these 
waves of God flow into me, I no longer reckon lost 
time. I no longer poorly compute my possible achieve- 
ment by what remains to me of the month or the year ; 
for these moments confer a sort of omnipresence and 
omnipotence which asks nothing of duration, but sees 
that the energy of the mind is commensurate with the 
work to be done, without time. 

And thus, circular philosopher, I hear some 
reader exclaim, you have arrived at a fine Pyrrhonism, 
at an equivalence and indifferency of all actions, and 
would fain teach us that, if we are true, forsooth, our 
crimes may be lively stones out of which we shall con- . 
struct the temple of the true God ! 

I am not careful to justify myself. I own I am 



248 ESSAY X. 

gladdened by seeing the predominance of the saccha- 
rine principle throughout vegetable nature, and not 
less by beholding in morals that unrestrained inunda- 
tion of the principle of good into every chink and hole 
that selfishness has left open, yea, into selfishness and 
sin itself ; so that no evil is pure, nor hell itself with- 
out its extreme satisfactions. But lest I should mis- 
lead any when I have my own head and obey my 
whims, let me remind the reader that I am only an 
experimenter. Do not set the least value on what I 
do, or the least discredit on what I do not, as if I pre- 
tended to settle anything as true or false. I unsettle 
all things. No facts are to me sacred ; none are pro- 
fane , I simply experiment, an endless seeker, with no 
Past at my back. 

Yet this incessant movement and progression which 
all things partake could never become sensible to us 
but by contrast to some principle of fixture or stabil- 
ity in the soul. Whilst the eternal generation of cir- 
cles proceeds, the eternal generator abides. That cen- 
tral life is somewhat superior to creation, superior to 
knowledge and thought, and contains all its circles. 
For ever it labors to create a life and thought as large 
and excellent as itself; but in vain; for that which is 
made instructs how to make a better. 

Thus there is no sleep, no pause, no preservation, 
but all things renew, germinate, and spring. Why 
should we import rags and relics into the new hour ? 
Nature abhors the old, and old age seems the only 
disease; all others run into this one. We call it by 
many names, — fever, intemperance, insanity, stupid- 
ity, and crime; they are all forms of old age; they 



CIRCLES, 249 

are rest, conservatism, appropriation, inertia, not new- 
ness, not the way onward. We grizzle every day. I 
see no need of it. Whilst we converse with what is 
above us, Ave do not grow old, but grow young. In- 
fancy, youth, receptive, aspiring, with religious eye 
looking upward, counts itself nothing, and abandons 
itself to the instruction flawing from all sides. But 
the man and woman of seventy assume to know all, 
they have outlived their hope, they renounce aspira- 
tion, accept the actual for the necessary, and talk 
down to the young. Let them, then, become organs 
of the Holy Ghost ; let them be lovers ; let them 
behold truth ; and their eyes are uplifted, their wrin- 
kles smoothed, they are perfumed again with hope 
and power. This old age ought not to creep on a 
human mind. In nature every moment is new ; the 
past is always swallowed and forgotten ; the coming 
only is sacred. Nothing is secure but life, transition, 
the energizing spirit. No love can be bound by oath 
or covenant to secure it against a higher love. No 
truth so sublime but it may be trivial to-morrow in 
the light of new thoughts. People wish to be settled ; 
only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope 
for them. 

Life is a series of surprises. We do not guess to- 
day the mood, the pleasure, the power of to-morrow, 
when we are building up our being. Of lower states, 
— of acts of routine and sense, — we can tell some- 
what ; but the masterpieces of God, the total growths 
and universal movements of the soul, he hideth ; they 
are incalculable. I can know that truth is divine and 
helpful ; but how it shall help me I can have no guess, 



250 ESSAY X 

for so to be is the sole inlet of so to know. The new 
position of the advancing man has all the powers of 
the old, yet has them all new. It carries in its bosom 
all the energies of the past, yet is itself an exhalation 
of the morning. I cast away in this new moment all 
my once hoarded knowledge, as vacant and vain. 
Now, for the first time, seem I to know any thing 
rightly. The simplest words, — we do not know 
what they mean, except when we love and aspire 

The difference between talents and character is 
adroitness to keep the old and trodden round, and pow- 
er and courage to make a new road to new and better 
goals. Character makes an overpowering presence; 
a cheerful, determined hour, which fortifies all the com- 
pany, by making them see that much is possible and 
excellent that was not thought of Character dulls 
the impression of particular events. When we see the 
conqueror we do not think much of any one battle or 
success. We see that we had exaggerated the diffi- 
culty. It was easy to him. The great man is not 
convulsible or tormentable ; events pass over him 
without much impression. People say sometimes, 
" See what I have overcome ; see how cheerful I am ; 
see how completely I have triumphed over these black 
events." Not if they still remind me of the black 
event. True conquest is the causing the calamity to 
fade and disappear, as an early cloud of insignificant 
result in a history so large and advancing. 

The one thing which we seek with insatiable desire 
is to forget ourselves, to be surprised out of our pro- 
priety, to lose our sempiternal memory, and to do 
something without knowing how or why ; in short, to 



CIRCLES. 251 

draw a new circle. Nothing great was ever achieved 
without enthusiasm. The way of life is wonderful : 
it is by abandonment. The great moments of history 
are the facilities of performance through the strength 
of ideas, as the works of genius and religion. " A 
man," said Oliver Cromwell, " never rises so high as 
when he knows not whither he is going." Dreams 
and drunkenness, the use of opium and alchohol are 
the semblance and counterfeit of this oracular genius, 
and hence their dangerous attraction for men. For 
the like reason, they ask the aid of wild passions, as 
in gaming and war, to ape in some manner these 
flames and generosities of the heart. 



INTELLECT. 



Go, speed the stars of Thought 
On to their shining goals ; — 
The sower scatters broad his seed,- 
The wheat thou strew'st be souls. 



ESSAY XL 



INTELLECT. 




VERY substance is negatively electric to 
that which stands above it in the chemical 
tables, positively to that which stands below 
it. Water dissolves wood, and iron, and 
salt; air dissolves water; electric fire dissolves air; 
but the intellect dissolves fire, gravity, laws, method, 
and the subtlest unnamed relations of nature, in its 
resistless menstruum. Intellect lies behind genius, 
which is intellect constructive. Intellect is the sim- 
ple power anterior to all action or construction. 
Gladly would I unfold in calm degrees a natural his- 
tory of the intellect, but what man has yet been able 
to mark the steps and boundaries of that transparent 
essence ? The first questions are always to be asked, 
and the wisest doctor is gravelled by the inquisitive- 
ness of a child. How can we speak of the action of 
the mind under any divisions, as of its knowledge, of 
its ethics, of its works, and so forth, since it melts will 
into perception, knowledge into act? Each becomes 
the other. Itself alone is. Its vision is not like the 
vision of the eye, but is union with the things known. 
Intellect and intellection signify to the common ear 



256 ESSAY XL 

consideration of abstract truth. The considerations 
of time and place, of you and me, of profit and hurt, 
tyrannize over most men's minds. Intellect separates 
the fact considered from you, from all local and per- 
sonal reference, and discerns it as if it existed for its 
own sake. Heraclitus looked upon the affections as 
dense and colored mists. In the fog of good and evil 
affections, it is hard for man to walk forward in a 
straight line. Intellect is void of affection, and sees 
an object as it stands in the light of science, cool and 
disengaged. The intellect goes out of the individual, 
floats over its own personality, and regards it as a fact, 
and not as / and mine. He who is immersed in what 
concerns person or place cannot see the problem of 
existence. This the intellect always ponders. Nature 
shows all things formed and bound. The intellect 
pierces the form, overleaps the wall, detects intrinsic 
likeness between remote things, and reduces all things 
into a few principles. 

The making a fact the subject of thought raises it. 
All that mass of mental and moral phenomena, which 
we do not make objects of voluntary thought, come 
within the power of fortune ; they constitute the cir- 
cumstance of daily life ; they are subject to change, to 
fear and hope. Every man beholds his human condi- 
tion with a degree of melancholy. As a ship aground 
is battered by the waves, so man, imprisoned in mor- 
tal life, lies open to the mercy of coming events. But 
a truth, separated by the intellect, is no longer a sub- 
ject of destiny. We behold it as a god upraised 
above care and fear. And so any fact in our like, or 
any record of our fancies or reflections, disentangled 



INTELLECT. 257 

from the web of our unconsciousness, becomes an ob- 
ject impersonal and immortal. It is the past restored 
but embalmed. A better art than that of Egypt has 
taken fear and corruption out of it. It is eviscerated 
of care. It is offered for science. What is addressed 
to us for contemplation does not threaten us, but 
makes us intellectual beings. 

The growth of the intellect is spontaneous in every 
expansion. The mind that grows could not predict 
the times, the means, the mode of that spontaneity. 
God enters by a private door into every individual. 
Long prior to the age of reflection is the thinking of 
the mind. Out of darkness, it came insensibly into 
the marvellous light of to-day. In the period of in- 
fancy it accepted and disposed of all impressions from 
the surrounding creation after its own way. What- 
ever any mind doth or saith is after a law; and this 
native law remains over it after it has come to reflec- 
tion or conscious thought. In the most worn, pedan- 
tic, introverted self-tormentor's life, the greatest part 
is incalculable by him, unforeseen, unimaginable, and 
must be, until he can take himself up by his own ears. 
What am I ? What has my will done to make me 
that I am ? Nothing. I have been floated into this 
thought, this hour, this connection of events, by secret 
currents of might and mind, and my ingenuity and 
wilfulness have not thwarted, have not aided to an 
appreciable degree. 

Our spontaneous action is always the best. You 

cannot, with your best deliberation and heed, come so 

close to any question as your spontaneous glance shall 

bring you, whilst you rise from your bed, or walk 

17 



258 i:SSAY XL 

abroad in the morning after meditating the matter be- 
fore sleep on the previous night. Our thinking is a 
pious reception. Our truth of thought is therefore 
vitiated as much by too violent direction given by our 
will, as by too great negligence. We do not deter- 
mine what we will think. We only open our senses, 
clear away, as we can, all obstruction from the fact, 
and suffer the intellect to see. We have little control 
over our thoughts. We are the prisoners of ideas. 
They catch us up for moments into their heaven, and 
so fully engage us, that we take no thought for the 
morrow, gaze like children, without an effort to make 
them our own. By and by we fall out of that rapture, 
bethink us where we have been, what we have seen, 
and repeat as truly as we can, what we have beheld. 
As far as we can recall these ecstasies, we carry away 
in the ineffaceable memory the result, and all men 
and all the ages confirm it. It is called Truth. But 
the moment we cease to report, and attempt to correct 
and contrive, it is not truth. 

If we consider what persons have stimulated and 
profited us, we shall perceive the superiority of the 
spontaneous or intuitive principle over the arithmeti- 
cal or logical. The first contains the second, but vir- 
tual and latent. We want, in every man, a long 
logic ; we cannot pardon the absence of it, but it must 
not be spoken. Logic is the procession or proportion- 
ate unfolding of the intuition ; but its virtue is as 
silent method ; the moment it would appear as propo- 
sitions, and have a separate value, it is worthless. 

In every man's mind, some images, words, and facts 
remain, without effort on his part to imprint them, 



I 



INTELLECT. 



259 



which others forget, and afterwards these illustrate to 
him important laws. All our progress is an unfold- 
ing, like the vegetable bud. You have first an in- 
stinct, then an opinion, then a knowledge, as the plant 
has root, bud, and fruit. Trust the instinct to the end, 
though you can render no reason. It is vain to 
hurry it. By trusting it to the end, it shall ripen into 
truth, and you shall know why you believe. 

Each mind has its own method. A true man never 
acquires after college rules. What you have aggregat- 
ed in a natural manner surprises and delights when it 
is produced. For we cannot oversee each other's 
secret. And hence the differences between men in 
natural endowment are insignificant in comparison 
with their common wealth. Do you think the porter 
and the cook have no anecdotes, no experiences, no 
wonders for you ? Everybody knows as much as the 
savant. The walls of rude minds are scrawled all 
over with facts, with thoughts. They shall one day 
bring a lantern and read the inscriptions. Every 
man, in the degree in which he has wit and culture, 
finds his curiosity inflamed concerning the modes of liv- 
ing and thinking of other men, and especially of those 
classes whose minds have not been subdued by the 
drill of school education. 

This instinctive action never ceases in a healthy 
mind, but becomes richer and more frequent in its in- 
formations through all states of culture. At last 
comes the era of reflection, when we not only observe, 
but take pains to observe ; when we of set purpose sit 
down to consider an abstract truth ; when we keep the 
mind's eye open, whilst we converse, whilst we read, 



26o ESSAY XL 

whilst we act, intent to learn the secret law of some 
class of facts. 

What is the hardest task in the world ? To think. 
I would put myself in the attitude to look in the eye 
an abstract truth, and I cannot. I blench and with- 
draw on this side and on that. I seem to know what 
he meant who said, No man can see God face to face 
and live. For example, a man explores the basis of 
civil government. Let him intend his mind without 
respite, without rest, in one direction. His best heed 
long time avails him nothing. Yet thoughts are flit- 
ting before him. We all but apprehend, we dimly 
forebode the truth. We say, I will walk abroad, and 
the truth will take form and clearness to me. We go 
forth, but cannot find it. It seems as if we needed 
only the stillness and composed attitude of the library 
to seize the thought. But we come in, and are as far 
fix)ra it as at first. Then, in a moment, and unan- 
nounced, the truth appears. A certain, wandering 
light appears, and is the distinction, the principle, we 
wanted. But the oracle comes, because we had previ- 
ously laid seige to the shrine. It seems as if the law 
of the intellect resembled that law of nature by which 
we now inspire, now expire the breath ; by which the 
heart now draws in, then hurls out the blood, — the 
law of undulation. So now you must labor with your 
brains, and now you must forbear your activity, and 
see what the great Soul showeth. 

The immortality of man is as legitimately preached 
from the intellections as from the moral volitions. 
Every intellection is mainly prospective. Its present 
value is its least. Inspect what delights you in Plu- 



INTELLECT. 261 

tarch, in Shakespeare, in Cervantes. Each truth that 
a writer acquires is a lantern, which he turns full on 
what facts and thoughts lay already in his mind, and 
behold, all the mats and rubbish which had littered 
his garret become precious. Every trivial fact in his 
private biography becomes an illustration of this new 
principle, revisits the day, and delights all men by its 
piquancy and new charm. Men say, Where did he 
get this 1: and think there was something divine in his 
life. But no ; they have myriads of facts just as good, 
would they only get a lamp to ransack their attics 
withal. 

We are all wise. The difference between persons, 
is not in wisdom but in art. I knew, in an academi- 
cal club, a person who always deferred to me, who, 
seeing my w^him for writing, fancied that my experi- 
ences had somewhat superior ; whilst I saw that his 
experiences were as good as mine. Give them to me, 
and I would make the same use of them. He held 
the old ; he holds the new ; I had the habit of tacking 
together the old and the new, which he did not use to 
exercise. This may hold in the great examples. 
Perhaps if w^e should meet Shakespeare, we should not 
be conscious of any steep inferiority ; no : but of a 
great equality, — only that he possessed a strange skill 
of using, of classifying, his facts, which we lacked. 
For, notwithstanding our utter incapacity to produce 
any thing like Hamlet and Othello, see the perfect 
reception this wit, and immense knowledge of life, and 
liquid eloquence find in us all. 

If you gather apples in the sunshine, or make hay, 
or hoe corn, and then retire within doors, and shut 



262 ESSAY XL 

your eyes, and press them with your hand, you shall 
still see apples hanging in the bright light, with 
boughs and leaves thereto, or the tasselled grass, or 
the corn-flags, and this for five or six hours after- 
wards. There lie the impressions on the retentive 
organ, though you knew it not. So lies the whole 
series of natural images with which your life has made 
}X)u acquainted in your memory, though you know it 
not, and a thrill of passion flashes light on their dark 
chamber, and the active power seizes instantly the fit 
image, as the word of its momentary thought. 

It is long ere we discover how rich we are. Our 
history, we are sure, is quite tame : we have nothing 
to write, nothing to infer. But our wiser years still 
run back to the despised recollections of childhood, 
and always we are fishing up some wonderful article 
out of that pond ; until, by and by, we begin to sus- 
pect that the biography of the one foolish person we 
know is, in reality, nothing less than the miniature 
paraphrase of the hundred volumes of the Universal 
History. 

In the intellect constructive, which we popularly 
designate by the word Genius, we observe the same 
balance of two elements as in intellect receptive. The 
constructive intellect produces thoughts, sentences, 
poems, plans, designs, systems. It is the generation 
of the mind, the marriage of thought with nature. 
To genius must always go two gifts, the thought and 
the publication. The first is revelation, always a mir- 
acle, which no frequency of occurrence or incessant 
study can ever familiarize, but which must always 
leave the inquirer stupid with wonder. It is the 



INTELLECT. 263 

advent of truth into the world, a form of thought 
now, for the first time, bursting into the universe, a 
child of the old eternal soul, a piece of genuine and 
immeasurable greatness. It seems, for the time, to 
inherit all that has yet existed, and to dictate to the 
unborn. It affects every thought of man, and goes to 
fashion every institution. But to make it available, it 
needs a vehicle or art by which it is conveyed to men. 
To be communicable, it must become picture or sen- 
sible object. We must learn the language of facts. 
The most wonderful inspirations die with their subject, 
if he has no hand to paint them to the senses. The 
ray of light passes invisible through space, and only 
when it falls on an object is it seen. When the spirit- 
ual energy is directed on something outward, then it is 
a thought. The relation between it and you first 
makes you, the value of you, apparent to me. The 
rich, inventive genius of the painter must be smoth- 
ered and lost for want of the power of drawing, and in 
our happy hours we should be inexhaustible poets, if 
once we could break through the silence into adequate 
rhyme. As all men have some access to primary 
truth, so all have some art or power of communication 
in their head, but only in the artist does it descend into 
the hand. There is an inequality, whose laws we do 
not yet know, between two men and between two mo- 
ments of the same man, in respect to this faculty. In 
common hours, we have the same facts as in the un- 
common or inspired, but they do not sit for their 
portraits ; they are not detached, but lie in a web. 
The thought of genius is spontaneous ; but the power 
of picture or expression, in the most enriched and 



264 ESSAY XL 

flowing nature, implies a mixture of will, a certain con- 
trol over the spontaneous states, without which no 
production is possible. It is a conversion of all na- 
ture into the rhetoric of thought, under the eye of 
judgment, with a strenuous exercise of choice. And 
yet the imaginative vocabulary seems to be spontane- 
ous also. It does not flow from experience only or 
mainly, but from a richer source. Not by any con- 
scious imitation of particular forms are the grand 
strokes of the painter executed, but by repairing to 
the fountain-head of all forms in his mind. Who is 
the first drawing-master? Without instruction we 
know very well the ideal of the human form. A child 
knows if an arm or a leg be distorted in a picture, if 
the attitude be natural or grand, or mean, though he 
has never received any instruction in drawing, or 
heard any conversation on the subject, nor can him- 
self draw with correctness a single feature. A good 
form strikes all eyes pleasantly, long before they have 
any science on the subject ; and a beautiful face sets 
twenty hearts in palpitation, prior to all consideration 
of the mechanical proportions of the features and 
head. We may owe to dreams some light on the 
fountain of this skill ; for, as soon as we let our will 
go, and let the unconscious states ensue, see what cun- 
ning draughtsmen we are! We entertain ourselves 
with wonderful forms of men, of women, of animals, 
of gardens, of woods, and of monsters, and the mystic 
pencil wherewith we then draw has no awkwardness 
or inexperience, no meagreness or poverty ; it can 
design well, and group well ; its composition is full 
of art^ its colors are well laid on, and the whole can- 



INTELLECT. 265 

vas which it paints is lifelike, and apt to touch us 
with terror, with tenderness, with desire, and with grief. 
Neither are the artist's copies from experience ever 
mere copies, but always touched and softened by tints 
from this ideal domain. 

The conditions essential to a constructive mind do 
not appear to be so often combined but that a good 
sentence or verse remains fresh and memorable for a 
long time. Yet when we write with ease, and come 
out into the free air of thought, we seem to be assured 
that nothing is easier than to continue this communi- 
cation at pleasure. Up, down, around, the kingdom 
of thought has no inclosures, but the Muse makes us 
free of her city. Well, the world has a million 
writers. One would think, then, that good thought 
would be as familiar as air and water, and the gifts 
of each new hour would exclude the last. Yet we can 
count all our good books ; nay, I remember any beau- 
tiful verse for twenty years. It is true that the dis- 
cerning intellect of the world is always much in 
advance of the creative, so that there are many com- 
petent judges of the best book, and few writers of the 
best books. But some of the conditions of intellectual 
construction are of rare occurrence. The intellect is 
a whole, and demands integrity in every work. This 
is resisted equally by a man's devotion to a single 
thought, and by his ambition to combine too many. 

Truth is our element of life, yet if a man fasten his 
attention on a single aspect of truth, and apply him- 
self to that alone for a long time, the truth becomes 
distorted and not itself, but falsehood; herein re- 
sembling the air, which is our natural element, and 



266 JESS AY XL 

the breath of our nostrils, but if a stream of the same 
be directed on the body for a time, it causes cold, 
fever, and even death. How wearisome the gram- 
marian, the phrenologist, the political or religious fa- 
natic, or indeed any possessed mortal whose balance 
is lost by the exaggeration of a single topic. It is 
incipient insanity. Every thought is a prison also. 
I cannot see what you see, because I am caught up 
by a strong wind, and blown so far in one direction 
that I am out of the hoop of your, horizon. 

Is it any better, if the student, to avoid this offence, 
and to liberalize himself, aims to make a mechanical 
whole of history, or science, or philosophy, by a nu- 
merical addition of all the facts that fall within his 
vision ? The world refuses to be analyzed by addi- 
tion and subtraction. When we are young, we spend 
much time and pains in filling our note-books with 
all definitions of Religion, Love, Poetry, Politics, Art, 
in the hope that, in the course of a few years, we shall 
have condensed into our encyclopaedia the net value 
of all the theories at which the world has yet arrived. 
But year after year our tables get no completeness, 
and at last we discover that our curve is a parabola, 
whose arcs will never meet. 

Neither by detachment, neither by aggregation, is 
the integrity of the intellect transmitted to its works, 
but by a vigilance which brings the intellect in its 
greatness and best state to operate every moment. 
It must have the same wholeness which nature has. 
Although no diligence can rebuild the universe in a 
model, by the best accumulation or disposition of de- 
tails, yet does the world reappear in miniature in 



INTELLECT, 267 

every event, so that all the laws of nature may be 
read in the smallest fact. The intellect miisfc have 
the like perfection in its apprehension and in its 
works. For this reason, an index or mercury of in- 
tellectual proficiency is the perception of identity. 
We talk with accomplished persons who appear to be 
strangers in nature. The cloud, the tree, the turf, 
the bird, are not theirs, have nothing of them : the 
world is only their lodging and table. But the poet, 
whose verses are to be spheral and complete, is one 
whom Nature cannot deceive, whatsoever face of 
strangeness she may put on. He feels a strict con- 
sanguinity, and detects more likeness than variety in 
all her changes. We are stung by the desire for new 
thought; but when we receive a new thought, it is 
only the old thought with a new face, and though we 
make it our own, we instantly crave another ; we are 
not really enriched. For the truth was in us before 
it was reflected to us from natural objects ; and the 
profound genius will cast the likeness of all creatures 
into every product of his wit. 

But if the constructive powers are rare, and it is 
given to few men to be poets, yet every man is a re- 
ceiver of this descending holy ghost, and may well 
study the laws of its influx. Exactly parallel is the 
whole rule of intellectual duty to the rule of moral 
duty. A self-denial, no less austere than the saint's, 
is demanded of the scholar. He must worship truth, 
and forego all things for that, and choose defeat and 
pain, so that his treasure in thought is thereby aug- 
mented. 

God offers to every mind its choice between truth 



268 ESSAY XL 

and repose. Take which you please, — you can never 
have both. Between these, as a pendulum, man os-. 
dilates. He in whom the love of repose predominates 
will accept the first creed, the first philosophy, the 
first political party he meets, — most likely his father's. 
He gets rest, commodity, and reputation ; but he shuts 
the door of truth. He in whom the love of truth pre- 
dominates will keep himself aloof from all moorings, 
and afloat. He will abstain from dogmatism, and 
recognize all the opposite negations, between which, 
as walls, his being is swung. He submits to the in- 
convenience of suspense and imperfect opinion, but he 
is a candidate for truth, as the other is not, and re- 
spects the highest law of his being. 

The circle of the green earth he must measure with 
his shoes, to find the man who can yield him truth. 
He shall then know that there is somewhat more 
blessed and great in hearing than in speaking. Happy 
is the hearing man ; unhappy the speaking man. As 
long as I hear truth, I am bathed by a beautiful ele- 
ment, and am not conscious of any limits to my na- 
ture. The suggestions are thousandfold that I hear 
and see. The waters of the great deep have ingress 
and egress to the soul. But if I speak, I define, I 
confine, and am less. When Socrates speaks. Lysis 
and Menexenus are afflicted by no shame that they do 
not speak. They also are good. He likewise defers 
to them, loves them, whilst he speaks. Because a true 
and natural man contains and is the same truth which 
an eloquent man articulates : but in the eloquent man, 
because he can articulate it, it seems something the 
less to reside, and he turns to these silent beautiful 



INTELLECT. 269 

with the more inclination and respect. The ancient 
sentence said, Let us be silent, for so are the gods. 
Silence is a solvent that destroys personality, and 
gives us leave to be great and universal. Every man's 
progress is through a succession of teachers, each of 
whom seems at the time to have a superlative influ- 
ence, but it at last gives place to a new. Frankly let 
him accept it all. Jesus says. Leave father, mother, 
house, and lands, and follow me. Who leaves all, re- 
ceives more. This is as true intellectually as mor- 
ally. Each new mind we approach seems to require 
an abdication of all our past and present possessions. 
A new doctrine seems, at first, a subversion of all our 
opinions, tastes, and manner of living. Such has 
Swedenborg, such has Kant, such has Coleridge, such 
has Hegel or his interpreter Cousin, seemed to many 
young men in this country. Take thankfully and 
heartily all they can give. Exhaust them, wrestle 
with them, let them not go until their blessing be 
won, and, after a short season, the dismay will be 
overpast, the excess of influence withdrawn, and they 
will be no longer an alarming meteor, but one more 
bright star shining serenely in your heaven, and 
blending its light with all your day. 

But whilst he gives himself up unreservedly to that 
which draws him, because that is his own, he is to 
refuse himself to that which draws him not, whatso- 
ever fame and authority may attend it, because it is 
not his own. Entire self-reliance belongs to the in- 
tellect. One soul is a counterpoise of all souls, as a 
capillary column of water is a balance for the sea. 
It must treat things, and books, and sovereign genius, 



270 ESSAY XL 

as itself also a sovereign. If JEschylus be that man 
he is taken for, he has not yet done his office, when 
he has educated the learned of Europe for a thousand 
years. He is now to approve himself a master of de- 
light to me also. If he cannot do that, all his fame 
shall avail him nothing with me. I were a fool not 
to sacrifice a thousand ^schyluses to my intellectual 
integrity. Especially take the same ground in regard 
to abstract truth, the science of the mind. The Ba- 
con, the Spinoza, the Hume, Schelling, Kant, or who- 
soever propounds to you a philosophy of the mind, is 
only a more or less awkward translator of things in 
your consciousness, which you have also your way of 
seeing, perhaps of denominating. Say, then, instead 
of too timidly poring into his obscure sense, that he 
has not succeeded in rendering back to you your con- 
sciousness. He has not succeeded ; now let another 
try. If Plato cannot, perhaps Spinoza will. If Spi- 
noza cannot, then perhaps Kant. Anyhow, when at 
last it is done, you will find it is no recondite, but a 
simple, natural, common state, which the writer re- 
stores to you. 

But let us end these didactics. I will not, though 
the subject might provoke it, speak to the open ques- 
tion between Truth and Love. I shall not presume 
to interfere in the old politics of the skies ; — " The 
cherubim know most ; the seraphim love most." The 
gods shall settle their own quarrels. But I cannot 
recite, even thus rudely, laws of the intellect, without 
remembering that lofty and sequestered class who 
have been its prophets and oracles, the high-priesthood 
of the pure reason, the Trismegisti, the expounders of 



INTELLECT. 271 

the principles of thought from age to age. When, at 
long intervals, we turn over their abstruse pages, 
wonderful seems the calm and grand air of these few, 
these great spiritual lords, who have walked in the 
world, — these of the old religion, — dwelling in a 
worship which makes the sanctities of Christianity 
look parvenues and popular ; for " persuasion is in soul, 
but necessity is in intellect." This band of grandees, 
Hermes, Heraclitus, Empedocles, Plato, Plotinus, 
Olympiodorns, Proclus, Synesius, and the rest, have 
somewhat so vast in their logic, so primary in their 
thinking, that it seems antecedent to all the ordinary 
distinctions of rhetoric and literature, and to be at 
once poetry, and music, and dancing, and astronomy, 
and mathematics. I am present at the sowing of the 
seed of the world. With a geometry of sunbeams, 
the soul lays the foundations of nature. The truth 
and grandeur of their thought is proved by its scope 
and applicability, for it commands the entire schedule 
and inventory of things for its illustration. But what 
marks its elevation, and has even a comic look to us, 
is the innocent serenity with which these babe-like 
Jupiters sit in their clouds, and from age to age prat- 
tle to each other, and to no contemporary. Well 
assured that their speech is intelligible, and the most 
natural thing in the world, they add thesis to thesis, 
without a moment's heed of the universal astonish- 
ment of the human race below, who do not compre- 
hend their plainest argument ; nor do they ever re- 
lent so much as to insert a popular or explaining sen- 
tence ; nor testify the least displeasure or petulance 
at the dulness of their amazed auditory. The angels 



272" ESSAY XL 

are so enamored of the language that is spoken in 
heaven, that they will not distort their lips with the 
hissing and unmusical dialects of men, but speak 
their own, whether there be any who understand it or 
not 



ART 



Give to barrows, trays, and pans 
Grace and glimmer of romance; 
Bring the moonlight into noon 
Hid in gleaming piles of stone 5 
On the city's paved street 
Plant gardens lined with lilac sweet ; 
Let spouting fountains cool the air, 
Singing in the sun-baked square ; 
Let statue, picture, park, and hall, 
Ballad, flag, and festival, 
The past restore, the day adorn, 
And make each morrow a new morn. 
So shall the drudge in dusty frock 
Spy behind the city clock 
Retinues of airy kings, 
Skirts of angels, starry wings, 
His fathers shining in bright fables, 
His children fed at heavenly tables. 
'T is the privilege of Art 
Thus to play its cheerful part, 
Man in Earth to acclimate. 
And bend the exile to his fate ; 
And, moulded of one element 
With the days and firmament, 
Teach him on these as stairs to climb, 
And live on even terms with Time ; 
Whilst upper life the slender rill 
Of human sense doth overfill. 

18 



ESSAY XII. 



ART. 




E CAUSE the soul is progressive, it never 
quite repeats itself, but in every act attempts 
the production of a new and fairer whole. 
This appears in works both of the useful 
and the fine arts, if we employ the popular distinction 
of works according to their aim either at use or beauty. 
Thus in our fine arts, not imitation, but creation, is the 
aim. In landscapes, the painter should give the sugges- 
tion of a fairer creation than we know. The details, 
the prose of nature he should omit, and give us only 
the spirit and splendor. He should know that the 
landscape has beauty for his eye, because it expresses a 
thought which is to him good ; and this, because the 
same power which sees through his eyes is seen in 
that spectacle ; and he will come to value the expres- 
sion of nature, and not nature itself, and so exalt in 
his copy the features that please him. He will give 
the gloom of gloom, and the sunshine of sunshine. 
In a portrait, he must inscribe the character, and not 
the features, and must esteem the man who sits to 
him as himself only an imperfect picture or likeness of 
the aspiring original within. 



276 JESS AY XI I. 

What is that abridgment and selection we observe in 
all spiritual activity, but itself the creative impulse ? for 
it is the inlet of that higher illumination which teaches 
to convey a larger sense by simpler symbols. What 
is a man but nature's finer success in self-explication ? 
What is a man but a finer and compacter landscape 
than the horizon figures, — nature's eclecticism ? and 
what is his speech, his love of painting, love of 
nature, but a still finer success ? all the weary miles 
and tons of space and bulk left out, and the spirit or 
moral of it contracted into a musical word, or the 
most cunning stroke of the pencil ? 

But the artist must employ the symbols in use in 
his day and nation, to convey his enlarged sense to 
his fellow-men. Thus the new in art is always formed 
out of the old. The Genius of the Hour sets his in- 
effaceable seal on the work, and gives it an inexpres- 
sible charm for the imagination. As far as the spirit- 
ual character of the period overpowers the artist, and 
finds expression in his work, so far it will retain a cer- 
tain grandeur, and will represent to future beholders 
the Unknown, the Inevitable, the Divine. No man 
can quite exclude this element of Necessity from his 
labor. No man can quite emancipate himself from 
his age and country, or produce a model in which the 
education, the religion, the politics, usages, and arts, 
of his times shall have no share. Though he were 
never so original, never so wilful and fantastic, he 
cannot wipe out of his work every trace of the thoughts 
amidst which it grew. The very avoidance betrays 
the usage he avoids. Above his will, and out of his 
sight, he is necessitated, by the air he breathes, and 



ART. 



277 



the idea on which he and his contemporaries live and 
toil, to share the manner of his times, without knowing 
what that manner is. Now that which is inevita- 
ble in the work has a higher charm than individual 
talent can ever give, inasmuch as the artistes pen 
or chisel seems to have been held and guided by a 
gigantic hand to inscribe a line in the history of the 
human race. This circumstance gives a value to the 
Egyptian hieroglyphics, to the Indian, Chinese, and 
Mexican idols, however gross and shapeless. They 
denote the height of the human soul in that hour, 
and were not fantastic, but sprung from a necessity 
as deep as the world. Shall I now add, that the 
whole extant product of the plastic arts has herein its 
highest value, as history; as a stroke drawn in the 
portrait of that fate, perfect and beautiful, according 
to whose ordinations all beings advance to their beati- 
tude ? 

Thus, historically viewed, it has been the office of 
art to educate the perception of beauty. We are im- 
mersed in beauty, but our eyes have no clear vision. 
It needs, by the exhibition of single traits, to assist, 
and lead the dormant taste. We carve and paint, or 
we behold what is carved and painted, as students of 
the mystery of Form. The virtue of art lies in 
detachment, in sequestering one object from the em- 
barrassing variety. Until one thing comes out from 
the connection of things, there can be enjoyment, con- 
templation, but no thought. Our happiness and un- 
happiness are unproductive. The infant lies in a 
pleasing trance, but his individual character and his 
practical power depend on his daily progress in the 



278 i:SSAY XII. 

separation of things, and dealing with one at a time. 
Love and all the passions concentrate all existence 
around a single form. It is the habit of certain 
minds to give an all-excluding fulness to the object, 
the thought, the word, they alight upon, and to make 
that for the time the deputy of the world. These are 
the artists, the orators, the leaders of society. The 
power to detach, and to magnify by detaching, is the 
essence of rhetoric in the hands of the orator and the 
poet. This rhetoric, or power to fix the momentary 
eminency of an object, — so remarkable in Burke, 
in Byron, in Carlyle, — the painter and sculptor 
exhibit in color and in stone. The power depends 
on the depth of the artist's insight of that object he 
contemplates. For every object has its roots in cen- 
tral nature, and may of course be so exhibited to us 
as to represent the world. Therefore, each work of 
genius is the tyrant of the hour, and concentrates 
attention on itself. For the time, it is the only thing 
worth naming to do that, — be it a sonnet, an opera, 
a landscape, a statue, an oration, the plan of a temple, 
of a campaign, or of a voyage of discovery. Presently 
we pass to some other object, which rounds itself into 
a whole, as did the first ; for example, a well-laid 
garden : and nothing seems worth doing but the lay- 
ing out of gardens. I should think fire the best thing 
in the world, if I were not acquainted with air, and 
water, and earth. For it is the right and property of 
all natural objects, of all genuine talents, of all na- 
tive properties whatsoever, to be for their moment the 
top of the world. A squirrel leaping from bough to 
bough, and making the wood but one wide tree for 



ART. 



279 



his pleasure, fills the eye not less than a lion, — is 
beautiful, self-sufficing, and stands then and there for 
nature. A good ballad draws my ear and heart 
whilst I listen, as much as an epic has done before. 
A dog, drawn by a master, or a litter of pigs, satisfies, 
and is a reality not less than the frescoes of Angelo. 
From this succession of excellent objects, we learn at 
last the immensity of the world, the opulence of hu- 
man nature, which can run out to infinitude in any 
direction. But I also learn that what astonished and 
fascinated me in the first work astonished me in 
the second work also ; that excellence of all things is 
one. 

The office of painting and sculpture seems to be 
merely initial. The best pictures can easily tell us 
their last secret. The best pictures are rude draughts 
of a few of the miraculous dots and lines and dyes which 
make up the ever-changing " landscape with figures " 
amidst which we dwell. Painting seems to be to the eye 
Avhat dancing is to the limbs. When that has edu- 
cated the frame to self-possession, to nimbleness, to 
grace, the steps of the dancing-master are better for- 
gotten ; so painting teaches me the splendor of color 
and the expression of form ; and, as I see many pictures 
and higher genius in the art, I see the boundless opu- 
lence of the pencil, the indifFerency in which the artist 
stands free to choose out of the possible forms. If he 
can draw every thing, why draw any thing ? and then 
is my eye opened to the eternal picture which nature 
paints in the street with moving men and children, 
beggars, and fine ladies, draped in red, and green, and 
blue, and gray; long-haired, grizzled, white-faced, 



28o ESSAY XIL 

black-faced, wrinkled, giant, dwarf, expanded, elfish, 
• — capped and based by heaven, earth, and sea. 

A gallery of sculpture teaches more austerely the 
same lesson. As picture teaches the coloring, so sculp- 
ture the anatomy of form. When I have seen fine 
statues, and afterwards enter a public assembly I un- 
derstand well what he meant who said, " When I have 
been reading Homer, all men look like giants." I too 
see that painting and sculpture are gymnastics of the 
eye, its training to the niceties and curiosities of its 
function. There is no statue like this living man, 
with his infinite advantage over all ideal sculpture, of 
perpetual variety. What a gallery of art have I here ! 
No mannerist made these varied groups and diverse 
original single figures. Here is the artist himself im- 
provising, grim and glad, at his block. Now one 
thought strikes him, now another, and with each mo- 
ment he alters the whole air, attitude, and expression 
of his clay. Away with your nonsense of oil and 
easels, of marble and chisels : except to open your 
ej^es to the masteries of eternal art, they are hypocriti- 
cal rubbish. 

The reference of all production at last to an abo- 
riginal Power explains the traits common to all works 
of the highest art, — that they are universally intelli- 
gible; that they restore to us the simplest states of 
mind ; and are religious. Since what skill is therein 
shown is the reappearance of the original soul, a jet of 
pure light, it should produce a similar impression to 
that made by natural objects. In happy hours, na- 
ture appears to us one with art ; art perfected, — the 
work of genius. And the individual, in whom simple 



ART. 281 

tastes and susceptibility to all the great human influ- 
ences overpower the accidents of a local and special 
culture, is the best critic of art. Though we travel 
the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it 
with us, or we find it not. The best of beauty is a 
finer charm than skill in surfaces, in outlines, or rules 
of art can ever teach, namely, a radiation from the 
work of art of human character, — a wonderful expres- 
sion through stone, or canvas, or musical sound, of 
the deepest and simplest attributes of our nature, and 
therefore most intelligible at last to those souls which 
have these attributes. In the sculptures of the Greeks, 
in the masonry of the Romans, and in the pictures of 
the Tuscan and Venetian masters, the highest charm 
is the universal language they speak. A confession 
of moral nature, of purity, love, and hope, breathes 
from them all. That which we carry to them, the 
same we bring back more fairly illustrated in the mem- 
ory. The traveller who visits the Vatican, and passes 
from chamber to chamber through galleries of statues, 
vases, sarcophagi, and candelabra, through all forms 
of beauty, cut in the richest materials, is in danger of 
forgetting the simplicity of the principles out of which 
they all sprung, and that they had their origin froai 
thoughts and laws in his own breast. He studies the 
technical rules on these wonderful remains, but forgets 
that these works were not always thus constellated; 
that they are the contributions of many ages and many 
countries ; that each came out of the solitary workshop 
of one artist, who toiled perhaps in ignorance of the 
existence of other sculpture, created his work without 
other model, save life, household life, and the sweet 



282 ESSAY XII. 

and smart of personal relations, of beating hearts, and 
meeting eyes, of poverty, and necessity, and hope, and 
fear. These were his inspirations, and these are the 
effects he carries home to your heart and mind. In 
proportion to his force, the artist will find in his work 
an outlet for his proper character. He must not be 
in any manner pinched or hindered by his material, 
but through his necessity of imparting himself the ada- 
mant will be wax in his hands, and will allow an ade- 
quate communication of himself, in his fall stature and 
proportion. He need not cumber himself with a con- 
ventional nature and culture, nor ask what is the 
mode in Eome or in Paris, but that house, and weath- 
er, and manner of living which poverty and the fate 
of birth have made at once so odious and so dear, in 
the gray, unpainted wood cabin, on the corner of a 
New Hampshire farm, or in the log-hut of the back- 
woods, or in the narrow lodging where he has endured 
the constraints and seeming of a city poverty, will 
serve as well as any other condition as the symbol of 
a thought which pours itself indifferently through all. 
I remember, when in my younger days I had heard 
of the wonders of Italian painting, I fancied the great 
pictures would be great strangers; some surprising 
combination of color and form; a foreign wonder, 
barbaric pearl and gold, like the spontoons and stand- 
ards of the militia, which play such pranks in the eyes 
and imaginations of school-boys. I was to see and 
acquire I knew not what. When I came at last to 
Rome, and saw with eyes the pictures, I found that 
genius left to novices the gay and fantastic and osten- 
tatious, and itself pierced directly to the simple and 



ART. 283 

true ; that it was familiar and sincere ; that it was the 
old, eternal fact I had met already in so many forms, 
— unto which I lived ; that it was the plain you and me 
I knew so well, — had left at home in so many con- 
versations. I had the same experience already in a 
church at Naples. There I saw that nothing was 
changed with me but the place, and said to myself, — 
" Thou foolish child, hast thou come out hither, over 
four thousand miles of salt water, to find that which 
was perfect to thee there at home ? *' — that fact I saw 
again in the Academmia at Naples, in the chambers 
of sculpture, and yet again when I came to Rome, and 
to the paintings of Raphael, Angelo, Sacchi, Titian, 
and Leonardo da Vinci. " What, old mole ; workest 
thou in the earth so fast ? " It had travelled by my 
side : that which I fancied I had left in Boston was 
here in the Vatican, and again at Milan, and at Paris, 
and made all travelling ridiculous as a treadmill. I 
now require this of all pictures, that they domesticate 
me, not that they dazzle me. Pictures must not be 
too picturesque. Nothing astonishes men so much as 
common-sense and plain dealing. All great actions 
have been simple, and all great pictures are. 

The Transfiguration, by Raphael, is an eminent ex- 
ample of this peculiar merit. A calm, benignant beau- 
ty shines over all this picture, and goes directly to the 
heart. It seems almost to call you by name. The 
sweet and sublime face of Jesus is beyond praise, yet 
how it disappoints all florid expectations ! This fa- 
miliar, simple, home-speaking countenance is as if one 
should meet a friend. The knowledge of picture- 
dealers has its value, but listen not to their criticism 



284 i:SSAY XII. 

when your heart is touched by genius. It was not 
painted for them, it was painted for you ; for such as 
had eyes capable of being touched by simplicity and 
lofty emotions. 

Yet when we have said all our fine things about the 
arts, we must end with a frank confession, that the 
arts, as we know them, are but initial. Our best 
praise is given to what they aimed and promised, not 
to the actual result. He has conceived meanly of the 
resources of man, who believes that the best age of 
production is past. The real value of the Iliad, or the 
Transfiguration, is as signs of power ; billows or rip- 
ples they are of the stream of tendency ; tokens of the 
everlasting effort to produce, which even in its worst 
estate the soul betrays. Art has not yet come to its 
maturity, if it do not put itself abreast with the most 
potent influences of the world, if it is not practical and 
moral, if it do not stand in connection with the con- 
science, if it do not make the poor and uncultivated 
feel that it addresses them with a voice of lofty cheer. 
There is higher work for Art than the arts. They 
are abortive births of an imperfect or vitiated instinct. 
Art is the need to create ; but in its essence, immense 
and universal, it is impatient of working with lame 
or tied hands, and of making cripples and monsters, 
such as all pictures and statues are. Nothing less 
than the creation of man and nature is its end. A 
man should find in it an outlet for his whole energy. 
He may paint and carve only as long as he can do 
that. Art should exhilarate, and throw down the 
walls of circumstance on every side, awakening in 
the beholder the same sense of universal relation and 



ART. 285 

power which the work evinced in the artist, and its 
highest effect i5 to make new artists. 

Already History is old enough to witness the old 
age and disappearance of particular arts. The art of 
sculpture is long ago perished to any real effect. It 
was originally a useful art, a mode of writing, a sav- 
age's record of gratitude or devotion, and among a peo- 
ple possessed of a wonderful perception of form this 
childish carving was refined to the utmost splendor of 
effect. But it is the game of a rude and youthful peo- 
ple, and not the manly labor of a wise and spiritual na- 
tion. Under an oak-tree loaded with leaves and nuts, 
under a sky full of eternal eyes, I stand in a thorough- 
fare ; but in the works of our plastic arts, and especially 
of sculpture, creation is driven into a corner. I can- 
not hide from myself that there is a certain appearance 
of paltriness, as of toys, and the trumpery of a theatre, 
in sculpture. Nature transcends all our moods of 
thought, and its secret we do not yet find. But the 
gallery stands at the mercy of our moods, and there is 
a moment when it becomes frivolous. I do not won- 
der that Newton, with an attention habitually engaged 
on the paths of planets and suns, should have won- 
dered what the Earl of Pembroke found to admire in 
" stone dolls." Sculpture may serve to teach the pu- 
pil how deep is the secret of form, how purely the 
spirit can translate its meanings into that eloquent di- 
alect. But the statue will look cold and false before 
that new activity which needs to roll through all 
things, and is impatient of counterfeits, and things 
not alive. Picture and sculpture are the celebrations 
and festivities of form. But true art is never fixed. 



286 ESSAY XIL 

but always flowing. The sweetest music is not in the 
oratorio, but in the human voice when it speaks from 
its instant life tones of tenderness, truth, or courage. 
The oratorio has already lost its relation to the morn- 
ing, to the sun, and the earth, but that persuading 
voice is in tune with these. All works of art should 
not be detached, but extempore performances. A 
great man is a new statue in every attitude and ac- 
tion. A beautiful woman is a picture which drives all 
beholders nobly mad. Life may be lyric or epic, as 
well as a poem or a romance. 

A true announcement of the law of creation, if a 
man were found worthy to declare it, would carry art 
up into the kingdom of nature, and destroy its sepa- 
rate and contrasted existence. The fountains of in- 
vention and beauty in modern society are all but dried 
up. A popular novel, a theatre, or a ball-room makes 
us feel that we are all paupers in the alms-house of 
this world, without dignity, without skill, or industry. 
Art is as poor and low. The old tragic Necessity, 
which lowers on the brows even of the Yenuses and 
the Cupids of the antique, and furnishes the sole apol- 
ogy for the intrusion of such anomalous figures into 
nature, — namely, that they were inevitable ; that the 
artist was drunk with a passion for form which he 
could not resist, and which vented itself in these fine 
extravagances, — no longer dignifies the chisel or the 
pencil. But the artist and the connoisseur now seek 
in art the exhibition of their talent, or an asylum from 
the evils of life. Men are not well pleased with the 
figure they make in their own imaginations, and they 
flee to art, and convey their better sense in an oratorio, 



ART. 287 

a statue, or a picture. Art makes the same effort 
which a sensual prosperity makes ; namely, to detach 
the beautiful from the useful, to do up the work as 
unavoidable, and, hating it, pass on to eifjoyment. 
These solaces and compensations, this division of beau- 
ty from use, the laws -of nature do not permit. As 
soon as beauty is sought, not from religion and love, 
but for pleasure, it degrades the seeker. High beauty 
is no longer attainable by him in canvas or in stone, 
in sound, or in lyrical construction ; an effeminate, 
prudent, sickly beauty, which is not beauty, is all that 
can be formed ; for the hand can never execute any 
thing higher than the character can inspire. 

The art that thus separates is itself first separated. 
Art must not be a superficial talent, but must begin 
farther back in man. Now men do not see nature to 
be beautiful, and they go to make a statue which shall 
be. They abhor men as tasteless, dull, and inconver- 
tible, and console themseh^es with color-bags, and 
blocks of marble. They reject life as prosaic, and cre- 
ate a death which they call poetic. They despatch 
the day^s weary chores, and fly to voluptuous reveries. 
They eaf and drink, that they may afterwards execute 
the ideal. Thus is art vilified ; the name conveys to 
the mind its secondary and bad senses ; it stands in 
the imagination as somewhat contrary to nature, and 
struck with death from the first. Would it not be 
better to begm higher up, — to serve the ideal before 
they eat and drink ; to serve the ideal in eating and 
drinking, in drawing the breath, and in the functions 
of life ? Beauty must come back to the useful arts, 
and the distinction between the fine and the useful arts 



288 ESSAY XII. 

be forgotten. If history were truly told, if life were 
nobly spent, it would be no longer easy or possible to 
distinguish the one from the other. In nature, all is 
useful, sdl is beautiful. It is therefore beautiful, be- 
cause it is alive, moving, reproductive i it is therefore 
useful, because it is symmetrical and fair. Beauty 
will not come at the call of a legislature, nor will it 
repeat in England or America its history in Greece. 
It will come as always, unannounced, and spring up 
between the feet of brave and earnest men. It is in 
vain that we look for genius to reiterate its miracles in . 
the old arts ; it is its instinct to find beauty and holi- 
ness in new and necessary facts, in the field and road- 
side, in the shop and mill. Proceeding from a relig- 
ious heart it will raise to a divine use the railroad, the 
insurance office, the joint-stock company, our law, our 
primary assemblies, our commerce, the galvanic bat- 
tery, the electric jar, the prism, and the chemist's re- 
tort, in which we seek now only an economical use. 
Is not the selfish and even cruel aspect which belongs 
to our great mechanical works, — to mills, railways, 
and machinery, — the effect of the mercenary impuls- 
es which these works obey 1 When its errands are 
noble and adequate, a steamboat bridging the Atlantic 
between Old and New England, and arriving at its 
ports with the punctuality of a planet, is a step of man 
into harmony with nature. The boat at St. Peters- 
burg, which plies along the Lena by magnetism, needs 
little to make it sublime. When science is learned in 
love, and its powers are wielded by love, they will ap- 
pear the supplements and continuations of the mate- 
rial creation. 



SECOND SERIES. 



'9 



THE POET. 



A moody child and wildly wise 

Pursued the game with joyful eyes, 

Which chose, like meteors, their way, 

And rived the dark with private ray ; 

They overleapt the horizon's edge, 

Searched with Apollo's privilege 5 

Through man, and woman, and sea, and star, 

Saw the dance of nature forward far ; 

Through worlds, and races, and terms, and times, 

Saw musical order, and pairing rhymes. 



Olympian bards who sung 

Divine ideas below, 
Which always find us young, 

And always keep us so 



ESSAY I. 



THE POET. 




^HOSE who are esteemed umpires of taste, 
are often persons who have acquired some 
knowledge of admired pictures or sculp- 
tures, and have an inclination for whatever 
is elegant ; but if you inquire whether they are beauti- 
ful souls, and whether their own acts are like fair 
pictures, you learn that they are selfish and sensual. 
Their cultivation is local, as if you should rub a log 
of dry wood in one spot to produce fire, all the rest 
remaining cold. Their knowledge of the fine arts is 
some study of rules and particulars, or some limited 
judgment of color or form, which is exercised for 
amusement or for show. It is a proof of the shallow- 
ness of the doctrine of beauty, as it lies in the minds 
of our amateurs, that men seem to have lost the per- 
ception of the instant dependence of form upon soul. 
There is no doctrine of forms in our philosophy. We 
were put into our bodies, as fire is put into a pan, to 
be carried about ; but there is no accurate adjustment 
between the spirit and the organ, much less is the lat- 
ter the germination of the former. So in regard to 
other forms, the intellectual men do not believe in any 



294 ESSAY I. 

essential dependence of the material world on thought 
and volition. Theologians think it a pretty air-castle 
to talk of the spiritual meaning of a ship or a cloud, 
of a city or a contract, but thej^ prefer to come again 
to the solid ground of historical evidence ; and even 
the poets are contented with a civil and conformed 
manner of living, and to write poems from the fancy, 
at a safe distance from their own experience. But 
the highest minds of the world have never ceased to 
explore the double meaning, or, shall I say, the quad- 
ruple, or the centuple, or much more manifold mean- 
ing, of every sensuous fact : Orpheus, Empedocles, 
Heraclitus, Plato, Plutarch, Dante, Swedenborg, and 
the masters of sculpture, picture, and poetry. For we 
are not pans and barrows, nor even porters of the fire 
and torch-bearers, but children of the fire, made of it, 
and only the same divinity transmuted, and at two or 
three removes, when we know least about it. And 
this hidden truth, that the fountains whence all this 
river of Time, and its creatures, floweth, are intrin- 
sically ideal and beautiful, draws us to the considera- 
tion of the nature and functions of the Poet or the 
man of Beauty, to the means and materials he uses, 
and to the general aspect of the art in the present 
time. 

The breadth of the problem is great, for the poet 
is representative. He stands among partial men for 
the complete man, and apprises us not of his wealth, 
but of the commonwealth. The young man reveres 
men of genius, because, to speak truly, they are more 
himself than he is. They receive of the soul as he 
also receives, but they more. Nature enhances her 



THE POET. 



295 



beauty, to the eye of loving men, from their belief that 
the poet is beholding her shows at the same time. 
He is isolated among his contemporaries, by truth and 
by his art, but with this consolation in his pursuits, 
that they will draw all men sooner or later. For all 
men live by truth, and stand in need of expression. 
In love, in art, in avarice, in politics, in labor, in 
games, we study to utter our painful secret. The 
man is only half himself, the other half is his expres- 
sion. 

Notwithstanding this necessity to be published, ad- 
equate expression is rare. I know not how it is that 
we need an interpreter ; but the great majority of men 
seem to be minors, who have not yet come into pos- 
session of their own, or mutes, who cannot report the 
conversation they have had with nature. There is no 
man who does not anticipate a supersensual utility in 
the sun, and stars, earth, and water. These stand and 
wait to render him a peculiar service. But there is 
some obstruction, or some excess of phlegm in our 
constitution, which does not suffer them to yield the 
due effect. Too feeble fall the impressions of nature 
on us to make us artists. Every touch should thrill. 
Every man should be so much an artist, that he could 
report in conversation what had befallen him. Yet, 
in our experience, the rays or appulse's have sufficient 
force to arrive at the senses, but not enough to reach 
the quick, and compel the reproduction of themselves 
in speech. The poet is the person in whom these 
powers are in balance, the man without impediment, 
who sees and handles that which others dream of, 
traverses the whole scale of experience, and is repre- 



296 ESSAY L 

sentative of man, in virtue of being the largest power 
to receive and to impart. 

For the Universe has three children, born at one 
time, which reappear, under different names, in every 
system of thought, whether they be called cause, oper- 
ation, and effect ; or, more poetically, Jove, Pluto, 
Neptune ; or, theologically, the Father, the Spirit, and 
the Son ; but which we will call here, the Knower, the 
Doer, and the Sayer. These stand respectively for 
the love of truth, for the love of good, and for the love 
of beauty. These three are equal. Each is that 
which he is essentially, so that he cannot be sur- 
mounted or analyzed, and each of these three has the 
power of the others latent in him, and his own patent. 

The poet is the sayer, the namer, and represents 
beauty. He is a sovereign, and stands on the centre. 
For the world is not painted, or adorned, but is from 
the beginning beautiful ; and God has not made some 
beautiful things, but Beauty is the creator of the uni- 
verse. Therefore the poet is not any permissive po- 
tentate, but is emperor in his own right. Criticism is 
infested with a cant of materialism, which assumes 
that manual skill and activity is the first merit of all 
men, and disparages such as say and do not, over- 
looking the fact, that some men, namely, poets, are 
natural sayers, sent into the world to the end of 
expression, and confounds them with those whose 
province is action, but who quit it to imitate the say- 
ers. But Homer's words are as .costly and admirable 
to Homer, as Agamemnon's victories are to Agamem- 
non. The poet does not wait for the hero or the sage, 
but, as they act and think primarily, so he writes 



THE POET. 



297 



primarily what will and must be spoken, reckoning 
the others, though primaries also, yet, in respect to 
him, secondaries and servants ; as sitters or models in 
the studio of a painter, or as assistants who bring 
building materials to an architect. 

For poetry was all written before time was, and 
whenever we are so finely organized that we can pen- 
etrate into that region where the air is music, we hear 
those primal warblings, and attempt to write them 
down, but we lose ever and anon a word, or a verse, 
and substitute something of our own, and thus mis- 
write the poem. The men of more delicate ear write 
down these cadences more faithfully, and these tran- 
scripts, though imperfect, become the songs of the 
nations. For nature is as truly beautiful as it is 
good, or as it is reasonable, and must as much appear, 
as it must be done, or be known. Words and deeds 
are quite indifferent modes of the divine energy. 
Words are also actions, and actions are a kind of 
words. 

The sign and credentials of the poet are, that he 
announces that which no man foretold. He is the 
true and only doctor ; he knows and tells ; he is the 
only teller of ncAvs, for he was present and privy to 
the appearance which he describes. He is a beholder 
jf ideas, and an utterer of the necessary and causal. 
For we do not speak now of men of poetical talents, 
or of industry and skill in metre, but of the true poet. 
I took part in a conversation, the other day, concern- 
ing a recent writer of lyrics, a man of subtle mind, 
whose head appeared to be a music-box of delicate 
tunes and rhythms, and whose skill, and command 



298 i:SSAY 1. 

of language, we could not sufficiently praise. But 
when the question arose, whether he was not only a 
lyrist, but a poet, we were obliged to confess that he 
is plainly a contemporary, not an eternal man. He 
does not stand out of our low limitations, like a Chim- 
borazo under the line, running up from a torrid base 
through all the climates of the globe, with belts of the 
herbage of every latitude on its high and mottled sides ; 
but this genius is the landscape-garden of a modern 
house, adorned with fountains and statues, with well- 
bred men and women standing and sitting in the 
walks and terraces. We hear, through all the varied 
music, the ground-tone of conventional life. Our 
poets are men of talents who sing, and not the chil- 
dren of music. The argument is secondary, the finish 
of the verses is primary. 

For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument, 
that makes a poem, — a thought so passionate and 
alive, that, like the spirit of a plant or an animal, it 
has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature 
with a new thing. The thought and the form are 
equal in the order of time, but in the order of genesis 
the thought is prior to the form. The poet has a new 
thought : he has a whole new experience to unfold ; 
he will tell us how it was with him, and all men will 
be the richer in his fortune. For the experience of 
each new age requires a new confession, and the world 
seems always waiting for its poet. I remember, when 
I was young, how much I was moved one morning by 
tidings that genius had appeared in a youth who sat 
near me at table. He had left his work, and gone 
rambling none knew whither, and had written hun- 



TEE POET. 299 

dreds of lines, but could not tell whether that which 
was in him was therein told : he could tell nothing 
but that all was changed, — man, beast, heaven, earth, 
and sea. How gladly we listened ! how credulous ! 
Society seemed to be compromised. We sat in the 
aurora of a sunrise which was to put out all the stars. 
Boston seemed to be at twice the distance it had the 
night before, or was much farther than that. Rome, 
— what was Rome ? Plutarch and Shakespeare were 
in the yellow leaf, and Homer no more should be 
heard of. It is much to know that poetry has been 
written this very day, under this very roof, by your 
side. What ! that w^onderful spirit has not expired ! 
These stony moments are still sparkling and animat- 
ed ! I had fancied that the oracles were all silent, and 
nature had spent her fires, and behold ! all night, 
from every pore, these fine auroras have been stream- 
ing. Every one has some interest in the advent of the 
poet, and no one knows how much it may concern 
him. We know that the secret of the world is pro- 
found, but who or what shall be our interpreter, we 
know not. A mountain ramble, a new style of face, 
a new person, may put the key into our hands. Of 
course, the value of genius to us is in the veracity of 
its report. Talent may frolic and juggle ; genius 
realizes and adds. Mankind, in good earnest, have 
availed so far in understanding themselves and their 
work, that the foremost watchman on the peak an- 
nounces his news. It is the truest word ever spoken, 
and the phrase will be the fittest, most musical, and 
the unerring voice of the world for that time. 

All that we call sacred history attests that the birth 



300 ESSAY L 

of a poet is the principal event in -chronology. Man, 
never so often deceived, still watches for the arrival of 
a brother v^ho can hold him steady to a truth, until 
he has made it his own. With what joy I begin to 
read a poem, which I confide in as an inspiration ! 
And now my chains are to be broken ; I shall mount 
above these clouds and opaque airs in which I live, — 
opaque, though they seem transparent, — and from 
the heaven of truth I shall see and comprehend my 
relations. That will reconcile me to life, and renovate 
nature, to see trifles animated by a tendency, and to 
know what I am doing. Life will no more be a noise ; 
now I shall see men and women, and knov/ the signs 
by which they may be discerned from fools and satans. 
This day shall be better than my birthday ; then I be- 
came an animal ; now I am invited into the science of 
the real. Such is the hope, but the fruition is post- 
poned. Oftener it falls, that this winged man, who 
will carry me into the heaven, whirls me into mists, 
then leaps and frisks about with me as it were from 
cloud to cloud, still affirming that he is bound heaven- 
ward ; and I, being myself a novice, am slow in per- 
ceiving that he does not know the way into the heav- 
ens, and is merely bent that I should admire his skill 
to rise, like a fowl or a flying-fish, a little way from 
the ground or the water ; but the all-piercing, all-feed- 
ing, and ocular air of heaven, that man shall never 
inhabit. I tumble down again soon into my old 
nooks, and lead the life of exaggerations as before, 
and have lost my faith in the possibility of any guide 
who can lead me thither where I would be. 

But, leaving these victims of vanity, let us, with new 



THE POET. 301 

hope, observe how nature, by worthier impulses, has 
insured the poet's fidelity to his office of announcement 
and affirming, namely, by the beauty of things, which 
becomes a new and higher beauty, when expressed. 
Nature offers all her creatures to him as a picture-lan- 
guage. Being used as a type, a second wonderful 
value appears in the object, far better than its old val- 
ue, as the carpenter's stretched cord, if you hold your 
ear close enough, is musical in the breeze. " Things 
more excellent than every image," says Jamblichus, 
" are expressed through images." Things admit of 
being used as symbols, because nature is a symbol, in 
the whole, and in every part. Every line we can draw 
in the sand has expression ; and there is no body 
without its spirit or genius. All form is an effect of 
character ; all condition, of the quality of the life ; all 
harmony, of health ; (and, for this reason, a percep- 
tion of beauty should be sympathetic, or proper only 
to the good.) The beautiful rests on the foundations 
of the necessary. The soul makes the body, as the 
wise Spenser teaches : — 

" So every spirit, as it is more pure, 
And hath in it the more of heavenly light, 
So it the fairer body doth procure 
To habit in, and it more fairly dight, 
With cheerful grace and amiable sight. 
For, of the soul, the body form doth take, 
For soul is form, and doth the body make." 

Here we find ourselves, suddenly, not in a critical 
speculation, but in a holy place, and should go very 
warily and reverently. We stand before the secret of 
the world, there where Being passes into Appearance, 
^nd Unity into Variety. 



302 ^>sf>s'^ir /. 

The Universe is the externization of the soul. 
Wherever the life is, that bursts into appearance around 
it. Our science is sensual, and therefore superficial. 
The earth and the heavenly bodies, physics, and chem- 
istry, we sensually treat, as if they were self-existent ; 
but these are the retinue of that Being we have. " The 
mighty heaven," said Proclus, " exhibits, in its trans- 
figurations, clear images of the splendor of intellectual 
perceptions ; being moved in conjunction with the un- 
apparent periods of intellectual natures." Therefore, 
science always goes abreast with the just elevation of 
the man, keeping step with religion and metaphysics ; 
or, the state of science is an index of our self-knowl- 
edge. Since every thing in nature answers to a mor- 
al power, if any phenomenon remains brute and dark, 
it is because the corresponding faculty in the observer 
is not yet active. 

No wonder, then, if these waters be so deep, that we 
hover over them with a religious regard. The beauty 
of the fable proves the importance of the sense ; to the 
poet, and to all others ; or, if you please, every man 
is so far a poet as to be susceptible of these enchant- 
ments of nature ; for all men have the thoughts whereof 
the universe is the celebration. I find that the fasci- 
nation resides in the symbol. Who loves nature ? 
Who does not 7 Is it only poets, and men of leisure 
and cultivation, who live with her 1 No ; but also 
hunters, farmers, grooms, and butchers, though they 
express their affection in their choice of life, and not 
in their choice of words. The writer wonders what 
the coachman or the hunter values in riding, in horses, 
and dogs. It is not superficial qualities. When you 



THE POET. 303 

talk with him, he holds these at as slight a rate as 
you. His worship is sympathetic ; he has no defini- 
tions, but he is commanded in nature, by the living 
power which he feels to be there present. No imita- 
tion, or playing of these things, would content him ; 
he loves the earnest of the north wind, of rain, of 
stone, and wood, and iron. A beauty not explicable 
is dearer than a beauty which we can see to the end of. 
It is nature the symbol, nature certifying the supernat- 
ural, body overflowed by life, which he worships, with 
coarse but sincere rites. 

The inwardness and mystery of this attachment 
drive men of every class to the use of emblems. The 
schools of poets and philosophers, are not more intox- 
icated with their symbols, than the populace with 
theirs. In our political parties, compute the power 
of badges and emblems. See the great ball which 
they roll from Baltimore to Bunker Hill ! In the 
political processions, Lowell goes in a loom, and Lynn 
in a shoe, and Salem in a ship. Witness the cider- 
barrel, the log-cabin, the hickory-stick, the palmetto, 
and all the cognizances of party. See the power of 
national emblems. Some stars, lilies, leopards, a cres- 
cent, a lion, an eagle, or other figure, which came into 
credit God knows how, on an old rag of bunting, 
blowing in the wind, on a fort, at the ends of the 
earth, shall make the blood tingle under the rudest or 
the most conventional exterior. The people fancy 
they hate poetry, and they are all poets and mystics ! 

Beyond this universality of the symbolic language 
we are apprised of the divineness of this superior use 
of things, whereby the world is a temple, whose walls 



304 ESSAY I. 

are covered with emblems, pictures, and command- 
ments of the Deity, in this, that there is no fact in 
nature which does not carry the whole sense of nature ; 
and the distinctions which we make in events, and in 
affairs, of low and high, honest and base, disappear 
when nature is used as a symbol. Thought makes 
every thing fit for use. The vocabulary of an omni- 
scient man would embrace words and images ex- 
cluded from polite conversation. What would be 
base, or even obscene, to the obscene, becomes illus- 
trious, spoken in a new connection of thought. The 
piety of the Hebrew prophets purges their grossness. 
The circumcision is an example of the power of 
poetry to raise the low and offensive. Small and 
mean things serve as well as great symbols. The 
meaner the type by which a law is expressed, the 
more pungent it is, and the more lasting in the mem- 
ories of men ; just as we choose the smallest box, or 
case, in which any needful utensil can be carried. 
Bare lists of words are found suggestive, to an imagi- 
native and excited mind ; as it is related of Lord 
Chatham, that he was accustomed to read in Bailey's 
Dictionary, when he was preparing to speak in Par- 
liament. The poorest experience is rich enough for 
all the purposes of expressing thought. Why covet 
a knowledge of new facts ? Day and night, house 
and garden, a few books, a few actions, serve us as 
well as would all trades and all spectacles. We are 
far from having exhausted the significance of the few 
symbols we use. We can come to use them yet with 
a terrible simplicity. It does not need that a poem 
should be long. Every word was once a poem. 



THE POET. 



305 



Every new relation is a new word. Also, we use 
defects and deformities to a sacred purpose, so express- 
ing our sense that the evils of the world are such only 
to the evil eye. In the old mythology, mythologists 
observe, defects are ascribed to divine natures, as 
lameness to Vulcan, blindness to Cupid, and the like, 
to signify exuberances. 

For, as it is dislocation and detachment from the 
life of God, that makes things ugly, the poet, who 
re-attaches things to nature and the Whole, — re-at- 
taching even artificial things, and violations of nature, 
to nature, by a deeper insight, — disposes very easily 
of the most disagreeable facts. Readers of poetry see 
the factory-village and the railway, and fancy that the 
poetry of the landscape is broken up by these ; for these 
works of art are not yet consecrated in their reading ; 
but the poet sees them fall within the great Order not 
less than the bee-hive, or the spider's geometrical web. 
Nature adopts them very fast into her vital circles, and 
the gliding train of cars she loves like her own. Be- 
sides, in a centred mind, it signifies nothing how 
many mechanical inventions you exhibit. Though 
you add millions, and never so surprising, the fact of 
mechanics has not gained a grain's weight. The 
spiritual fact remains unalterable, by many or by few 
particulars ; as no mountain is of any appreciable 
height to break the curve of the sphere. A shrewd 
country-boy goes to the city for the first time, and the 
complacent citizen is not satisfied with his little won- 
der. It is not that he does not see all the fine houses, 
and know that he never saw such before, but he dis- 
poses of them as easily as the poet finds place for the 
20 



3o6 ESSAY L 

railway. The chief value of the new fact, is to en^ 
hance the great and constant fact of Life, which can 
dwarf any and every circumstance, and to which the 
belt of wampum, and the commerce of America, are 
alike. 

The world being thus put under the mind /or verb 
and noun, the poet is he who can articulate it. For, 
though life is great, and fascinates, and absorbs, — 
and though all men are intelligent of the symbols 
through which it is named, — yet they cannot origi- 
nally use them. We are symbols, and inhabit sym- 
bols ; workmen, work, and tools, words and things, 
birth and death, all are emblems ; but we sympathize 
with the symbols, and, being infatuated with the 
economical uses of things, we do not know that they 
are thoughts. The poet, by an ulterior intellectual 
perception, gives them a power which makes their old 
use forgotten, and puts eyes, and a tongue, into every 
dumb and inanimate object. He perceives the inde- 
pendence of the thought on the symbol, the stability 
of the thought, the accidency and fugacity of the 
symbol. As the eyes of Lyncaeus were said to see 
through the earth, so the poet turns the world to glass, 
and shows us all things in their right series and pro- 
cession. For, through that better perception, he 
stands one step nearer to things, and sees the flowing 
or metamorphosis ; perceives that thought is multi- 
form; -that within the form of every creature is a 
force impelling it to ascend into a higher form ; 
and, following with his eyes the life, uses the forms 
which express that life, and so his speech flows with 
the flowing of nature. AH the facts of thp aninial 



THE POET. 307 

economy, sex, nutriment, gestation, birth, growth, are 
symbols of the passage of the world into the soul of 
man, to suffer there a change, and reappear a new 
and higher fact. He uses forms according to the life, 
and not according to the form. This is true science. 
The poet alone knows astronomy, chemistry, vegeta- 
tion, and animation, for he does not stop at these facts, 
but employs them as signs. He knows why the plain 
or meadow of space was strown with these flowers we 
call suns, and moons, and stars ; why the great deep 
is adorned with animals, with men, and gods ; for, 
in every word he speaks he rides on them as the 
horses of thought. 

By virtue of this science the poet is the Namer, or 
Language-maker, naming things sometimes after their 
appearance, sometimes after their essence, and giving 
to every one its own name and not another^s, thereby 
rejoicing the intellect, which delights in detachment 
or boundary. The poets made all the words, and 
therefore language is the archives of history, and, if 
we must say it, a sort of tomb of the muses. For, 
though the origin of most of our words is forgotten, 
each word was at first a stroke of genius, and obtained 
currency, because for the moment it symbolized the 
world to the first speaker and to the hearer. The ety- 
mologist finds the deadest word to have been once a 
brilliant picture. . Language is fossil poetry. As the 
limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses 
of the shells of animalcules, so language is made up 
of images, or tropes, which now, in their secondary 
use, have long ceased to remind us of their poetic or- 
igin. But the poet names the thing because he sees 



3o8 JESBAY L 

it, or comes one step nearer to it than any other. 
This expression, or namiug, is not art, but a second 
nature, grown out of the first, as a leaf out of a tree. 
What we call nature, is a certain self-regulated mo- 
tion, or change ; and nature does all things by her 
own hands, and does not leave another to baptize her, 
but baptizes herself; and this through the metamor- 
phosis again. I remember that a certain poet de- 
scribed it to me thus : — 

Genius is the activity which repairs the decays of 
things, whether wholly or partly of a material and 
finite kind. Nature, through all her kingdoms, insures 
herself. Nobody cares for planting the poor fungus : 
so she shakes down from the gills of one agaric count- 
less spores, any one of which, being preserved, transmits 
new billions of spores to-morrow or next day. The 
new agaric of this hour has a chance which the old 
one had not. This atom of seed is thrown into a new 
place, not subject to the accidents which destroyed its 
parent two rods off. She makes a man ; and having 
brought him to ripe age, she will no longer run the 
risk of losing this wonder at a blow, but she detaches 
from him a new self, that the kind may be safe from 
accidents to which the individual is exposed. So 
when the soul of the poet has come to ripeness of 
thought, she detaches and sends away from it its poems 
or songs, — a fearless, sleepless, deathless progeny, 
which is not exposed to the accidents of the weary 
kingdom of time : a fearless, vivacious offspring, clad 
with wings (such was the virtue of the soul out of 
which they came), which carry them fast and far, and 



THE POET. 309 

infix them irrecoverably into the hearts of men. 
These wings are the beauty of the poefs soul. The 
songs, thus flying immortal from th^ir mortal parent, 
are pursued by clamorous flights of censures, which 
swarm in far greater numbers, and threaten to devour 
them ; but these last are not winged. At the end of 
a very short leap they fall plump down, and rot, hav- 
ing received from the souls out of which they came no 
beautiful wings. But the melodies of the poet ascend, 
and leap, and pierce, into the deeps of infinite time. 

So far the bard taught me, using his freer speech. 
But nature has a higher end, in the production of new 
individuals, than security, namely, ascension, or, the 
passage of the soul into higher forms. I knew, in 
my younger days, the sculptor who made the statue 
of the youth which stands in the public garden. He 
was, as I remember, unable to tell directly, what made 
him happy, or unhappy, but by wonderful indirections 
he could tell. He rose one day, according to his 
habit, before the dawn, and saw the morning break, 
grand as the eternity out of which it came, and, for 
many days after, he strove to express this tranquillity, 
and, lo ! his chisel had fashioned out of marble the 
form of a beautiful youth, Phosphorus, whose aspect 
is such, that, it is said, all persons who look on it be- 
come silent. The poet also resigns himself to his 
mood, and that thought which agitated him is ex- 
pressed, but alter idem, in a manner totally new. The 
expression is organic, or, the new type which things 
themselves take when liberated. As, in the sun, 
objects paint their images on the retina of the eye, so 



3IO ESSAY L 

they, sharing the aspiration of the whole universe, tend 
to paint a far more delicate copy of their essence in 
his mind. Like the metamorphosis of things into 
higher organic forms, is their change into melodies. 
Over everything stands its daemon, or soul, and, as the 
form of the thing is reflected by the eye, so the soul 
of the thing is reflected by a melody. The sea, the 
mountain-ridge, Niagara, and every flower-bed, pre- 
exist, or super-exist, in pre-cantations, which sail like 
odors in the air, and when any man goes by with an 
ear sufiiciently fine, he overhears them, and endeavors 
to write down the notes, without diluting or depraving 
them. And herein is the legitimation of criticism, in 
the mind's faith, that the poems are a corrupt version 
of some text in nature, with which they ought to be 
made to tally. A rhyme in one of our sonnets should 
not be less pleasing than the iterated nodes of a sea- 
shell, or the resembling difference of a group of flow- 
ers. The pairing of the birds is an idyl, not tedious 
as our idyls are ; a tempest is a rough ode, without 
falsehood or rant : a summer, with its harvest sown, 
reaped, and stored, is an epic song, subordinating how 
many admirably executed parts. Why should not the 
symmetry and truth that modulate these, glide into 
our spirits, and we participate the invention of nature? 
This insight, which expresses itself by what is called 
Imagination, is a very high sort of seeing, which does 
not come by study, but by the intellect being where 
and what it sees, by sharing the path or circuit of 
things through forms, and so making them translucid 
to others. The path of things is silent. Will they 
suffer a speaker to go with them ? A spy they will 



THE POET. 311 

not suffer ; a lover, a poet, is the transcendency of tlieir 
own nature, — him they will «uffer. The condition of 
true naming, on the poet's part, is his resigning him- 
self to the divine aura which breathes through forms, 
and accompanying that. 

It is a secret which every intellectual man quickly 
learns, that, beyond the energy of his possessed and 
conscious intellect, he is capable of a new energy (as 
of an intellect doubled on itself), by abandonment to 
the nature of things ; that, beside his privacy of power 
as an individual man, there is a great public power, 
on which he can draw, by unlocking, at all risks, his 
human doors, and suffering the ethereal tides to roll 
and circulate through him : then he is caught up into 
the life of the Universe, his speech is thunder, his 
thought is law, and his words are universally intelli- 
gible as the plants and animals. The poet knows 
that he speaks adequately, then, only when he speaks 
somewhat wildly, or, '^ with the flower of the mind " ; 
not with the intellect, used as an organ, but with the 
intellect released from all service, and suffered to take 
its direction from its celestial life ; or, as the ancients 
were wont to express themselves, not with intellect 
alone, but with the intellect inebriated by nectar. As 
the traveller who has lost his way, throws his reins 
on his horse's neck, and trusts to the instinct of the 
animal to find his road, so must we do with the divine 
animal who carries us through this world. For if in 
any manner we can stimulate this instinct, new pas- 
sages are opened for us into nature, the mind flows into 
and through things hardest and highest, and the met- 
amorphosis is possible. 



312 ESSAY L 

This is the reason why bards love wine, mead, nar- 
cotics, coffee, tea, opium, the fumes of sandal-wood and 
tobacco, or whatever other procurers of animal exhila- 
ration. All men avail themselves of such means as 
they can, to add this extraordinary power to their 
normal powers ; and to this end they prize conversa- 
tion, music, pictures, sculpture, dancing, theatres, trav- 
elling, Avar, mobs, fires, gaming, politics, or love, or 
science, or animal intoxication, which are several coars- 
er or finer g'Mas2-mechanical substitutes for the true 
nectar, which is the ravishment of the intellect by 
coming nearer to the fact. These are auxiliaries to 
the centrifugal tendency of a man, to his passage out 
into free space, and they help him to escape the custo- 
dy of that body in which he is pent up, and of that 
jail-yard of individual relations in which he is enclosed. 
Hence a great number of such as were professionally 
expressers of Beauty, as painters, poets, musicians, 
and actors, have been more than others wont to lead a 
life of pleasure and indulgence ; all but the few who 
received the true nectar; and, as it was a spurious 
mode of attaining freedom, as it was an emancipation, 
not into the heavens, but into the freedom of baser 
places, they were punished for that advantage they won, 
by a dissipation and deterioration. But never can any 
advantage be taken of nature by a trick. The spirit 
of the world, the great calm presence of the Creator, 
comes not forth to the sorceries of opium or of wine. 
The sublime vision comes to the pure and simple soul 
in a clean and chaste body. That is not an inspira- 
tion which we owe to narcotics, but some counterfeit 
excitement and fury. Milton says, that the lyric poet 



THE POET. 



313 



may drink wine and live generously, but the epic poet, 
he who shall sing of the gods, and their descent unto 
men, must drink water out of a wooden bowl. For 
poetry is not " Devil's wine," but God's wine.. It is 
with this as it is with toys. We fill the hands and 
nurseries of our children with all manner of dolls, 
drums, and horses, withdrawing their eyes from the 
plain face and sufficing objects of nature, the sun, and 
moon, the animals, the water, and stones, which should 
be their toys. So the poet's habit of living should be 
set on a key so low, that the common influences should 
delight him. His cheerfulness should be the gift of 
the sunlight; the air should suffice for his inspiration, 
and he should be tipsy with water. That spirit which 
suffices quiet hearts, which seems to come forth to 
such from every dry knoll of sere grass, from every 
pine-stump, and half-imbedded stone, on which the 
dull March sun shines, comes forth to the poor and 
hungry, and such as are of simple taste. If thou fill 
thy brain with Boston and New York, with fashion 
and covetousness, and wilt stimulate thy jaded senses 
with wine and French coffee, thou shalt find no ra- 
diance of wisdom in the lonely waste of the pine- 
woods. 

If the imagination intoxicates the poet, it is not in- 
active in other men. The metamorphosis excites in 
the beholder an emotion of joy. The use of symbols 
has a certain power of emancipation and exhilaration 
for all men. We seem to be touched by a wand, 
which makes us dance and run about happily, like 
children. We are like persons who come out of a cave 
or cellar into the open air. This is the effect on us 



314 ESSAY I. 

of tropes, fables, oracles, and all poetic forms. Poets 
are thus liberating gods. Men have really got a new 
sense, and found within their world, another world, or 
nest of worlds ; for, the metamorphosis once seen, we 
divine that it does not stop. I will not now consider 
how much this makes the charm of algebra and the 
mathematics, which also have their tropes, but it is felt 
in every definition ; as, when Aristotle defines space to 
be an immovable vessel, in which things are contained ; 
— or, when Plato defines a line to be a flowing point ; 
or, Jigure to be a bound of solid ; and many the like. 
What a joyful sense of freedom we have, when Vitru- 
vius announces the old opinion of artists, that no ar- 
chitect can build any house well, who does not know 
something of anatomy. When Socrates, in Charmides, 
tells us that the soul is cured of its maladies by cer- 
tain incantations, and that these incantations are beau- 
tiful reasons, from which temperance is generated in 
souls ; when Plato calls the world an animal ; and 
Timaeus affirms that the plants also are animals ; or 
affirms a man to be a heavenly tree, growing with his 
root, which is his head, upward ; and, as George 
Chapman, following him, writes, — 

" So in our tree of man, whose nervie root 
Springs in his top " ; 

When Orpheus speaks of hoariness as "that white 
flower which marks extreme old age '' ; when Proclus 
calls the universe the statue of the intellect; when 
Chaucer, in his praise of " Gentilesse," compares good 
blood in mean condition to fire, which, though carried 
to the darkest house betwixt this and the mount of 
Caucasus, will yet hold its natural office, and burn as 



THE POET, 315 

bright as if twenty thousand men did it behold ; when 
John saw, in the apocalypse, the ruin of the world 
through evil, and the stars fall from heaven, as the fig- 
tree casteth her untimely fruit ; when -<Esop reports the 
whole catalogue of common daily relations through the 
masquerade of birds and beasts, — we take the cheerful 
hint of the immortality of our essence, and its versatile 
habit and escapes, as when the gypsies say of them- 
selves, "it is in vain to hang them, they cannot die." 

The poets are thus liberating gods. The ancient 
British bards had for the title of their order, ** Those 
who are free throughout the world." They are free, 
and they make free. An imaginative book renders us 
much more service at first, by stimulating us through 
its tropes, than afterward, when we arrive at the pre- 
cise sense of "the author. I think nothing is of any 
value in books, excepting the transcendental and ex- 
traordinary. If a man is inflamed and carried away 
by his thought, to that degree that he forgets the au- 
thors and the public, and heeds only this one dream, 
which holds him like an insanity, let me read his pa- 
per, and you may have all the arguments and histories 
and criticism. All the value which attaches to Pythag- 
oras, Paracelsus, Cornelius Agrippa, Cardan, Kepler, 
Swedenborg, Schelling, Oken, or any other who intro- 
duces questionable facts into his cosmogony, as angels, 
devils, magic, astrology, palmistry, mesmerism, and so 
on, is the certificate we have of departure from rou- 
tine, and that here is a new witness. That also is 
the best success in conversation, the magic of liberty, 
which puts the world, like a ball, in our hands. How 
cheap even the liberty then seems ; how mean to study, 



3i6 ESSAY L 

when an emotion communicates to the intellect the 
power to sap and upheave nature : how great the per- 
spective ! nations, times, systems, enter and disappear, 
like threads in tapestry of large figure and many col- 
ors ; dream delivers us to dream, and, while the drunk- 
enness lasts, we will sell our bed, our philosophy, our 
religion, in our opulence. 

There is good reason why we should prize this liber-, 
ation. The fate of the poor shepherd, who, blinded 
and lost in the snow-storm, perishes in a drift within 
a few feet of his cottage door, is an emblem of the 
state of man. On the brink of the waters of life and 
truth, we are miserably dying. The inaccessibleness 
of every thought but that we are in, is wonderful. 
What if you come near to it, — you are as remote, 
when you are nearest, as when you are farthest. 
Every thought is also a prison ; every heaven is also 
a prison. Therefore we love the poet, the inventor, 
who in any form, whether in an ode, or in an action, 
or in looks and behavior, has yielded us a new thought. 
He unlocks our chains, and admits us to a new scene. 

This emancipation is dear to all men, and the power 
to impart it, as it must come from greater depth and 
scope of thought, is a measure of intellect. Therefore 
all books of the imagination endure, all which ascend 
to that truth, that the writer sees nature beneath him, 
and uses it as his exponent. Every verse or sentence, 
possessing this virtue, will take care of its own immor- 
tality. The religions of the world are the ejaculations 
of a few imaginative men. 

But the quality of the imagination is to flow, and 
not to freeze. The poet did not stop at the color, or 



THE POET. 317 

the form, but read their meaning ; neither may he rest 
in this meaning, but he makes the same objects expor 
nents of his new thought. Here is the difference be- 
twixt the poet and the mystic, that the last nails a 
symbol to one sense, which was a true sense for a mo- 
ment, but soon becomes old and false. For all sym- 
bols are fluxional ; all language is vehicular and tran- 
sitive, and is good, as ferries and horses are, for con- 
veyance, not as farms and houses are, for homestead. 
Mysticism consists in the mistake of an accidental and 
individual symbol for an universal one. The morn- 
ing-redness happens to be the favorite meteor to the 
eyes of Jacob Behmen, and comes to stand to him for 
truth and faith ; and he believes should stand for the 
same realities to every reader. But the first reader 
prefers as naturally the symbol of a mother and child, 
or a gardener and his bulb, or a jeweller polishing a 
gem. Either of these, or of a myriad more, are equal- 
ly good to the person to whom they are significant. 
Only they must be held lightly, and be very willingly 
translated into the equivalent terms which others use. 
And the mystic must be steadily told, — All that you 
say is just as true without the tedious use of that sym- 
bol as with it. Let us have a little algebra, instead 
of this trite rhetoric, — universal signs, instead of these 
village symbols, — and we shall both be gainers. The 
history of hierarchies seems to show, that all religious 
error consisted in making the symbol too stark and 
solid, and, at last, nothing but an excess of the organ 
of language. 

Swedenborg, of all men in the recent ages, stands 
eminently for the translator of nature into thought. I 



3i8 ESSAY I. 

do not know the man in history to whom things stood 
so uniformly for words. Before him the metamorpho- 
sis continually plays. Everything on which his eye 
rests, obeys the impulses of moral nature. The figs 
become grapes whilst he eats them. When some of 
his angels affirmed a truth, the laurel twig which they 
held blossomed in their hands. The noise which, at 
a distance, appeared like gnashing and thumping, on 
coming nearer was found to be the voice of disputants. 
The men, in one of his visions, seen in heavenly light, 
appeared like dragons, and seemed in darkness r but, 
to each other, they appeared as men, and, when the 
light from heaven shone into their cabin, they com- 
plained of the darkness, and were compelled to shut 
the window that they might see. 

There was this perception in him, which makes the 
poet or seer an object of awe and terror, namely, that 
the same man, or society of men, may wear one aspect 
to themselves and their companions, and a different 
aspect to higher intelligences. Certain priests, whom 
he describes as conversing very learnedly together, ap- 
peared to the children, who were at some distance, like 
dead horses : and many the like misappearances. And 
instantly the mind inquires, whether these fishes under 
the bridge, yonder oxen in the pasture, those dogs in 
the yard, are immutably fishes, oxen, and dogs, or 
only so appear to me, and perchance to themselves ap- 
pear upright men ; and whether I appear as a man to 
all eyes. The Bramins and Pythagoras propounded 
the same question, and if any poet has witnessed the 
transformation, he doubtless found it in harmony with 
various experiences. We have ail seen changes as 



THE POET, 319 

considerable in wheat and caterpillars. He is the 
poet, and shall draw us with love and terror, who 
sees, through the flowing vest, the firm nature, and 
can declare it. 

I look in vain for the poet whom I describe. We 
do not, with sufiicient plainness, or sufficient pro- 
foundness, address ourselves to life, nor dare we chant 
our own times and social circumstance. If we filled 
the day .with bravery, we should not shrink from cele- 
brating it. Time and nature yield us many gifts, but 
not yet the timely man, the new religion, the reconcil- 
er, whom all things await. Dante's praise is that he 
dared to write his autobiography in colossal cipher, 
or into universality. We have yet had no genius in 
America, with tyrannous eye, which knew the value of 
our incomparable materials, and saw, in the barbarism 
and materialism of the times, another carnival of the 
same gods whose picture he so much admires in Ho- 
mer; then in the middle age; then in Calvinism. 
Banks and tariffs, the newspaper and caucus, metho- 
dism and unitarianism, are flat and dull to dull people, 
but rest on the same foundations of wonder as the 
town of Troy, and the temple of Delphos, and are as 
swiftly passing away. Our logrolling, our stumps and 
their politics, our fisheries, our Negroes, and Indians, 
our boats, and our repudiations, the wrath of rogues, 
and the pusillanimity of honest men, the northern 
trade, the southern planting, the western clearing, Ore- 
gon, and Texas, are yet unsung. Yet America is a 
poem in our eyes ; its ample geography dazzles the 
imagination, and it will not wait long for metres. If 
I have not found that excellent combination of gifts in 



3ZO ESSAY L 

my countrymen which I seek, neither could I aid my- 
self to fix the idea of the poet by reading now and then 
in Chalmers's collection of five centuries of English 
poets. These are wits, more than poets, though there 
have been poets among them. But when we adhere 
to the ideal of the poet, we have our difficulties even 
with Milton and Homer. Milton is too literary, and 
Homer too literal and historical. 

But I am not wise enough for a national criticism, 
and must use the old largeness a little longer, to dis- 
charge my errand from the muse to the poet concern- 
ing his art. 

Art is the path of the creator to his work. The 
paths, or methods, are ideal and eternal, though few 
men ever see them, not the artist himself for years, or 
for a lifetime, unless he come into the conditions. 
The painter, the sculptor, the composer, the epic rhap- 
sodist, the orator, all partake one desire, namely, to 
express themselves symmetrically and abundantly, not 
dwarfishly and fragmentarily. They found or put 
themselves in certain conditions, as, the painter and 
sculptor before some impressive human figures ; the 
orator, into the assembly of the people ; and the others, 
in such scenes as each has found exciting to his intel- 
lect; and each presently feels the new desire. He 
hears a voice, he sees a beckoning. Then he is ap- 
prised, with wonder, what herds of daemons hem him 
in. He can no more rest ; he says, with the old paint- 
er, " By God, it is in me, and must go forth of me." 
He pursues a beauty, half seen, which flies before him. 
The poet pours out verses in every solitude. Most of 
the things he says are conventional, no doubt ; but by 



THE POET. 



321 



and by he says something which is original and beau- 
tiful. That charms him. He would say nothing else 
but such things. In our way of talking, we say, 
" That is yours, this is mine ; " but the poet knows 
well that it is not his ; that it is as strange and beau- 
tiful to him as to you ; he would fain hear the like elo- 
quence at length. Once having tasted this immortal 
ichor, we cannot have enough of it, and as an admira- 
ble creative power exists in these intellections, it is of 
the last importance that these things get spoken. 
What a little of all we know is said ! What drops of 
all the sea of our science are baled up ! and by what 
accident it is that these are exposed, when so many 
secrets sleep in nature ! Hence the necessity of speech 
and song; hence these throbs and heart-beatings in 
the orator, at the door of the assembly, to the end, 
namely, that thought may be ejaculated as Logos, or 
Word. 

Doubt not, poet, but persist. Say, " It is in me, 
and shall out.'^ Stand there, balked and dumb, stut- 
tering and stammering, hissed and hooted, stand and 
strive, until, at last, rage draw out of thee that dream- 
power which every night shows thee is thine own ; a 
power transcending all limit and privacy, and by 
virtue of which a man is the conductor of the whole 
river of electricity. Nothing walks, or creeps, or 
grows, or exists, which must not in turn arise and 
walk before him as exponent of his meaning. Comes 
he to that power, his genius is no longer exhaustible. 
All the creatures, by pairs and by tribes, pour into his 
mind as into a Noah's ark, to come forth again to 
people a new world. This is like the stock of air for 
21 



322 i:SSAY L 

our respiration, or for the combustion of our fireplace, 
not a measure of gallons, but the entire atmosphere if 
wanted. And therefore the rich poets, as Homer, 
Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Raphael, have obviously 
no limits to their works, except the limits of their life- 
time, and resemble a mirror carried through the street, 
ready to render an image of every created thing. 

O poet ! a new nobility is conferred in groves and 
pastures, and not in castles, or by the sword-blade, 
any longer. The conditions are hard, but equal. 
Thou shalt leave the world, and know the muse only. 
Thou shalt not know any longer the times, customs, 
graces, politics, or opinions of men, but shalt take all 
from the muse. For the time of towns is tolled from 
the world by funereal chimes, but in nature the uni- 
versal hours are counted by succeeding tribes of ani- 
mals and plants, and by growth of joy on joy. God 
wills also that thou abdicate a manifold and duplex 
life, and that thou be content that others speak for 
thee. Others shall be thy gentlemen, and shall repre- 
sent all courtesy and worldly life for thee ; others shall 
do the great and resounding actions also. Thou 
shalt lie close hid with nature, and canst not be af- 
forded to the Capitol or the Exchange. The world 
is full of renunciations and apprenticeships, and this 
is thine ; thou must pass for a fool and a churl for a 
long season. This is the screen and sheath in which 
Pan has protected his well-beloved flower, and thou 
shalt be known only to thine own, and they shall con- 
sole thee with tenderest love. And thou shalt not be 
able to rehearse the names of thy friends in thy verse, 
for an old shame before the holy ideal. And this is 



THE POET, 323 

the reward : that the ideal shall be real to thee, and 
the impressions of the actual world shall fall like sum- 
mer rain, copious, but not troublesome, to thj invul- 
nerable essence. Thou shalt have the whole land for 
thy park and manor, the sea for thy bath and naviga- 
tion, without tax and without envy ; the woods and 
the rivers thou shalt own ; and thou shalt possess 
that wherein others are only tenants and boarders. 
Thou true land-lord ! sea-lord ! air-lord ! Wherever 
snow falls, or water flows, or birds fly, wherever day 
and night meet in twilight, wherever the blue heaven 
is hung by clouds, or sown with stars, wherever are 
forms with transparent boundaries, wherever are out- 
lets into celestial space, wherever is danger, and awe, 
and love, there is Beauty, plenteous as rain, shed for 
thee, and though thou shouldst walk the world over, 
thou shalt not be able to find a condition inopportune 
or ignoble. 



EXPEKIENCE. 



The lords of life, the lords of life, — 

I saw them pass, 

In their own guise, 

Like and unlike, / 

Portly and grim. 

Use and Surprise, 

Surface and Dream, 

Succession swift, and spectral Wrong, 

Temperament without a tongue. 

And the inventor of the game 

Omnipresent without name ; — 

Some to see, some to be guessed. 

They marched from east to west : 

Little man, least of all, 

Among the legs of his guardians tall, 

Walked about with puzzled look : — 

Him by the hand dear Nature took ; 

Dearest Nature, strong and kind, 

Whispered, "Darling, never mind ! 

To-morrow they will wear another face, 

The founder thou ! these are thy race ! " 



ESSAY n. 



EXPERIENCE, 




(IHERE do we find ourselves 1 In a series 
of which we do not know the extremes, 
and believe that it has none. We wake 
and find ourselves on a stair ; there are 
stairs below us, which we seem to have ascended; 
there are stairs above us, many a one, which go up- 
ward and out of sight. But the Genius which, accord- 
ing to the old belief, stands at the door by which we 
enter, and gives us the lethe to drink, that we may 
tell no tales, mixed the cup too strongly, and we can- 
not shake off the lethargy now at noonday. Sleej) 
lingers all our lifetime about our eyes, as night hovers 
all day in the boughs of the fir-tree. All things swim 
and glitter. Our life is not so much threatened as 
our perception. Ghostlike we glide through nature, 
and should not know our place again. Did our birth 
fall in some fit of indigence and frugality in nature, 
that she was so sparing of her fire and so liberal of her 
earth, that it appears to us that we lack the afiirma- 
tive principle, and though we have health and reason, 
yet we have no superfluity of spirit for new^ creation? 
We have enough to live and bring the year about, but 



328 ESSAY II. 

not an ounce to impart or to invest. Ah that our 
Genius were a little more of a genius ! "We are like 
millers on the lower levels of a stream, when the fac- 
tories above them have exhausted the water. We too 
fancy that the upper people must have raised their 
dams. 

If any of us knew what we were doing, or where 
we are going, then when we think we best know! 
We do not know to-day whether we are busy or idle. 
In times when we thought ourselves indolent, we have 
afterwards discovered, that much was accomplished, 
and much was begun in us. All our days are so un- 
profitable while they pass, that 'tis wonderful where 
or when we ever got anything of this which we call 
wisdom, poetry, virtue. We never got it on any dated 
calendar day. Some heavenly days must have been 
intercalated somewhere, like those that Hermes won 
with dice of the Moon, that Osiris might be born. It 
is said, all martyrdoms looked mean when they were 
suffered. Every ship is a romantic object, except that 
we sail in. Embark, and the romance quits our ves- 
sel, and hangs on every other sail in the horizon. Our 
life looks trivial, and we shun to record it. Men seem 
to have learned of the horizon the art of perpetual re- 
treating and reference. "Yonder uplands are rich 
pasturage, and my neighbor has fertile meadow, but 
my field,"' says the querulous farmer, " only holds the 
world together." I quote another man's saying ; un- 
luckily, that other withdraws himself in the same way, 
and quotes me. 'Tis the trick of nature thus to de- 
grade to-day ; a good deal of buzz, and somewhere a 
result slipped magically in. Every roof is agreeable 



EXPERIENCE. 329 

to the eye, until it is lifted ; then we find tragedy and 
moaning women, and hard-eyed husbands, and deluges 
of lethe, and the men ask, " What's the news ? " as if 
the old were so bad. How many individuals can we 
count in society ? how many actions '? how many 
opinions ? So much of our time is preparation, so 
much is routine, and so much retrospect, that the 
pith of each man's genius contracts itself to a very 
few hours. The history of literature, — take the net 
result of Tiraboschi, Warton, or Schlegel, — is a sum 
of very few ideas, and of very few original tales, — all 
the rest being variation ctf these. So, in this great 
society wide lying around us, a critical analysis would 
find very few spontaneous actions. It is almost all 
custom and gross sense. There are even few opinions, 
and these seem organic in the speakers, and do not 
disturb the universal necessity. 

What opium is instilled into all disaster ! It shows 
formidable as we approach it, but there is at last no 
rough rasping friction, but the most slippery sliding 
surfaces : we fall soft on a thought : Ate Dea is gentle, 

" Over men's heads walking aloft, 
With tender feet treading so soft." 

People grieve and bemoan themselves, but it is not 
half so bad with them as they say. There are moods 
in which we court suffering, in the hope that here, at 
least, we shall find reality, sharp peaks and edges of 
truth. But it turns out to be scene-painting and 
counterfeit. The only thing grief has taught me, is 
to know how shallow it is. That, like all the rest, 
plays about the surface, and never introduces me into 
the reality, for contact with which, we would even 



330 JESS AY IL 

pay the costly price of sons and lovers. Was it Bos- 
covich who found out that bodies never come in con- 
tact ? Well, souls never touch their objects. An 
innavigable sea washes with silent waves between us 
and the things we aim at and converse with. Grief 
too will make us idealists. In the death of my son, 
now more than two years ago, I seem to have lost a 
beautiful estate, — no more. I cannot get it nearer 
to me. If to-morrow I should be informed of the 
bankruptcy of my principal debtors, the loss of my 
property would be a great inconvenience to me, per- 
haps, for many years ; but it would leave me as it 
found me, — neither better nor worse. So is it with 
this calamity : it does not touch me ; something which 
I fancied was a part of me, which could not be torn 
away without tearing me, nor enlarged without enrich- 
ing me, falls off from me, and leaves no scar. It was 
caducous. I grieve that grief can teach me nothing, 
nor carry me one step into real nature. The Indian 
who was laid under a curse, that the wind should not 
blow on him, nor water flow to him, nor fire burn 
him, is a type of us all. The dearest events are sum- 
mer-rain, and we the Para coats that shed every drop. 
Nothing is left us now but death. We look to that 
with a grim satisfaction, saying, there at least is reality 
that will not dodge us. 

I take this evanescence and lubricity of all objects, 
which lets them slip through our fingers then when 
we clutch hardest, to be the most unhandsome part 
of our condition. Nature does not like to be observed, 
and likes that we should be her fools and playmates. 
We may have the sphere for our cricket-ball, but not 



EXPERIENCE. 331 

a berry for our philosophy. Direct strokes she never 
gave us power to make ; all our blows glance, all our 
hits are accidents. Our relations to each other are 
oblique and casual. 

Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to 
illusion. Life is a train of moods like a string of 
beads, and, as we pass through them they prove to be 
many-colored lenses which paint the world their own 
hue, and each shows only what lies in its focus. From 
the mountain you see the mountain. We animate 
what we can, and we see only what we animate. Na- 
ture and books belong to the eyes that see them. It 
depends on the mood of the man, whether he shall see 
the sunset or the fine poem. There are always sun- 
sets, and there is always genius ; but only a few hours 
so serene that we can relish nature or criticism. The 
more or less depends on structure or temperament. 
Temperament is the iron wire on which the beads are 
strung. Of what use is fortune or talent to a cold 
and defective nature ? Who cares what sensibility or 
discrimination a man has at some time shown, if he 
falls asleep in his chair ? or if he laugh and giggle ? 
or if he apologize ? or is infected with egotism ? or 
thinks of his dollar 1 or cannot go by food ? or has 
gotten a child in his boyhood ? Of what use is gen- 
ius, if the organ is too convex or too concave, and 
cannot find a focal distance within the actual horizon 
of human life 1 Of what use, if the brain is too cold 
or too hot, and the man does not care enough for 
results, to stimulate him to experiment, and hold him 
up in it ? or if the web is too finely woven, too irrita- 



332 i:SSAY IL 

ble by pleasure and pain, so that life stagnates from 
too much reception, without due outlet 1 Of what 
use to make heroic vows of amendment, if the same 
old law-breaker is to keep them ? What cheer can 
the religious sentiment yield, when that is suspected 
to be secretly dependent on the seasons of the year, 
and the state of the blood '? I knew a witty physician 
who found the creed in the biliary duct, and used to 
affirm that if there was disease in the liver, the man 
became a Calvinist, and if that organ was sound, he 
became a, Unitarian. Very mortifying is the reluctant 
experience that some unfriendly excess or imbecility 
neutralizes the promise of genius. We see young men 
who owe us a new world, so readily and lavishly they 
promise, but they never acquit the debt; they die 
young and dodge the account : or if they live, they 
lose themselves in the crowd. 

Temperament also enters fully into the system of 
illusions, and shuts us in a prison of glass which we 
cannot see. There is an optical illusion about every 
person we meet. In truth, they are all creatures of 
given temperament, which will appear in a given char- 
acter, whose boundaries they will never pass : but we 
look at them, they seem alive, and we presume there 
is impulse in them. In the moment it seems impulse ; 
in the year, in the lifetime, it turns out to be a certain 
uniform tune which the revolving barrel of the music- 
box must play. Men resist the conclusion in the 
morning, but adopt it as the evening wears on, that 
temper prevails over everything of time, place, and 
condition, and is inconsumable in the flames of relig- 
ion. Some modifications the moral sentiment avails 



EXPERIENCE. 333 

to impose, but the individual texture holds its domin- 
ion, if not to bias the moral judgments, yet to fix the 
measure of activity and of enjoyment. 

I thus express the law as it is read from the plat- 
form of ordinary life, but must not leave it without 
noticing the capital exception. For temperament is a 
power which no man willingly hears any one praise 
but himself. On the platform of physics, we cannot 
resist the contracting influences of so-called science. 
Temperament puts all divinity to rout. I know the 
mental proclivity of physicians. I hear the chuckle 
of the phrenologists. Theoretic kidnappers and slave- 
drivers, they esteem each man the victim of another, 
who winds him round his finger by knowing the law 
of his being, and by such cheap signboards as the 
color of his beard, or the slope of his occiput, reads 
the inventory of his fortunes and character. The 
grossest ignorance does not disgust like this impudent 
knowingness. The physicians say, they are not mate- 
rialists ; but they are : — Spirit is matter reduced to 
an extreme thinness : so thin ! — But the definition 
of spiritual should be, that which is its own evidence. 
What notions do they attach to love ! what to relig- 
ion ! One would not willingly pronounce these words 
in their hearing, and give them the occasion to pro- 
fane them. I saw a gracious gentleman who adapts 
his conversation to the form of the head of the man 
he talks with ! I had fancied that the value of life lay 
in its inscrutable possibilities ; in the fact that I never 
know, in addressing myself to a new individual, what 
may befall me. I carry the keys of my castle in my 
hand, ready to throw them at the feet of my lord, 



334 ESSAY 11. 

whenever and in what disguise soever he shall appear. 
I know he is in the neighborhood hidden among vag- 
abonds. Shall I preclude my future, by taking a 
high seat, and kindly adapting my conversation to the 
shape of heads 1 When I come to that, the doctors 

shall buy me for a cent. — " But, sir, medical 

history ; the report to the Institute ; the proven facts ! " 
— I distrust the facts and the inferences. Temper- 
ament is the veto or limitation-power in the constitu- 
tion, very justly applied to restrain an opposite excess 
in the constitution, but absurdly offered as a bar to 
original equity. When virtue is in presence, all sub- 
ordinate powers sleep. On its own level, or in view 
of nature, temperament is final. I see not, if one be 
once caught in this trap of so-called sciences, any 
escape for the man from the links of the chain 
of physical necessity. Given such an embryo, such a 
history must follow. On this platform, one lives in a 
sty of sensualism, and would soon come to suicide. 
But it is impossible that the creative power should 
exclude itself. Into every intelligence, there is a door 
which is never closed, through which the creator passes. 
The intellect, seeker of absolute truth, or the heart, 
lover of absolute good, intervenes for our succor, and 
at one whisper of these high powers, we awake from 
ineffectual struggles with this nightmare. We hurl it 
into its own hell, and cannot again contract ourselves 
to so base a state. 

The secret of the illusoriness is in the necessity of 
a succession of moods or objects. Gladly we would 
anchor, but the anchorage is quicksand. This onward 



EXPERIENCE. 335 

trick of nature is too strong for us : Pero si muove. 
When, at night, I look at the moon and stars, I seem 
stationary, and they to hurry. Our love of the real 
draws us to permanence, but health of body consists 
in circulation, and sanity of mind in variety or facility 
of association. We need change of objects. Dedication 
to one thought is quickly odious. We house with the 
insane, and must humor them ; then conversation dies 
out. Once I took such delight in Montaigne, that I 
thought I should not need any other book ; before that, 
in Shakespeare ; then in Plutarch ; then in Plotinus ; 
at one time in Bacon ; afterwards in Goethe ; even in 
Bettine ; but now I turn the pages of either of them 
languidly, whilst I still cherish their genius. So with 
pictures ; each will bear an emphasis of attention once, 
which it cannot retain, though we fain would continue 
to be pleased in that manner. How strongly I have 
felt of pictures, that when you have seen one well, you 
must take your leave of it ; you shall never see it 
again. I have had good lessons from pictures, which 
I have since seen without emotion or remark. A de- 
duction must be made from the -opinion, which even 
the wise express on a new book or occurrence. Their 
opinion gives me tidings of their mood, and some 
vague guess at the new fact, but is nowise to be trusted 
as the lasting relation between that intellect and that 
thing. The child asks, " Mamma, why don't I like the 
story as well as when you told it me yesterday 1 " 
Alas, child, it is even so with the oldest cherubim of 
knowledge. But will it answer thy question to say, 
Because thou wert born to a whole, and this story is 
a particular ? The reason of the pain this discovery 



336 ESSAY IL 

causes us (and we make it late in respect to works of art 
and intellect), is the plaint of tragedy which murmurs 
from it in regard to persons, to friendship and love. 

That immobility and absence of elasticity which we 
find in the arts, we find with more pain in the artist. 
There is no power of expansion in men. Our friends 
early appear to us as representatives of certain ideas, 
which they never pass or exceed. They stand on the 
brink of the ocean of thought and power, but they 
never take the single step that would bring them there. 
A man is like a bit of Labrador spar, which has no 
lustre as you turn it in your hand, until you come to 
a particular angle ; then it shows deep and beautiful 
colors. There is no adaptation or universal applica- 
bility in men, but each has his special talent, and the 
mastery of successful men consists in adroitly keeping 
themselves where and when that turn shall be oftenest 
to be practised. We do what we must, and call it by 
the best names we can, and would fain have the praise 
of having intended the result which ensues. I cannot 
recall any form of man who is not superfluous some- 
times. But is not this pitiful 1 Life is not worth the 
taking, to do tricks in. 

Of course, it needs the whole society, to give the 
symmetry we seek. The parti-colored wheel must re- 
volve very fast to appear white. Something is learned 
too by conversing with so much folly and defect. In 
fine, whoever loses, we are always of the gaining par- 
ty. Divinity is behind our failures and follies also. 
The plays of children are nonsense, but very educative 
nonsense. So it is with the largest and solemnest 
things, with commerce, government, church, marriage. 



EXPERIENCE. 337 

and so with the history of every man's bread, and the 
ways by which he is to come by it. Like a bird which 
alights nowhere, but hops perpetually from bough to 
bough, is the Power which abides in no man and in 
no woman, but for a moment speaks from this one, 
and for another moment from that one. 

But what help from these fineries or pedantries ? 
What help from thought ? Life is not dialectics. We, 
I think, in these times, have had lessons enough of 
the futility of criticism. Our young people have 
thought and written much on labor and reform, and 
for all that they have written, neither the world nor 
themselves have got on a step. Intellectual tasting 
of life will not supersede muscular activity. If a man 
should consider the nicety of the passage of a piece of 
bread down his throat, he would starve. At Educa- 
tion-Farm, the noblest theory of life sat on the noblest 
figures of young men and maidens, quite powerless 
and melancholy. It would not rake or pitch a ton of 
hay ; it would not rub down a horse ; and the men 
and maidens it left pale and hungry. A political ora- 
tor wittily compared our party promises to western 
roads, which opened stately enough, with planted trees 
on either side, to tempt the traveller, but soon became 
narrow and narrower, and ended in a squirrel-track, 
and ran up a tree. So does culture with us ; it ends 
in headache. Unspeakably sad and barren does life 
look to those, who a few months ago were dazzled 
with the splendor of the promise of the times. " There 
is now no longer any right course of action, nor any 
self-devotion left among the Iraais." Objections and 
22 



338 JESSAY II. 

criticism we have had our fill of. There are objections 
to every course of life and action, and the practical 
vi^sdom infers an indifferency, from the omnipresence 
of objection. The whole frame of things preaches in- 
differency. Do not craze yourself with thinking, but 
go about your business anywhere. Life is not intel- 
lectual or critical, but sturdy. Its chief good is for 
well-mixed people who can enjoy what they find, with- 
out question. Nature hates peeping, and our mothers 
speak her very sense when they say, " Children, eat 
your victuals, and say no more of it." To fill the 
hour, — that is happiness ; to fill the hour, and leave 
no crevice for a repentance or an approval. We live 
amid surfaces, and the true art of life is to skate well 
on them. Under the oldest mouldiest conventions, a 
man of native force prospers just as well as in the new- 
est world, and that by skill of handling and treatment. 
He can take hold anywhere. Life itself is a mixture 
of power and form, and will not bear the least excess 
of either. To finish the moment, to find the journey's 
end in every step of the road, to live the greatest num- 
ber of good hours, is wisdom. It is not the part of 
men, but of fanatics, or of mathematicians, if you will, 
to say, that, the shortness of life considered, it is not 
worth caring whether for so short a duration we were 
sprawling in want, or sitting high. Since our ofiice 
is with moments, let us husband them. Five minutes 
of to-day are worth as much to me as five minutes in 
the next millennium. Let us be poised, and wise, and 
our own, to-day. Let us treat the men and women 
well : treat them as if they were real : perhaps they 
are. Men live in their fancy, like drunkards whose 



EXPERIENCE. 339 

hands are too soft and tremulous for successful labor. 
It is a tempest of fancies, and the only ballast I know, 
is a respect to the present hour. Without any shadow 
of doubt, amidst this vertigo of shows and politics, I 
settle myself ever the firmer in the creed, that we 
should not postpone and refer and wish, but do broad 
justice where we are, by whomsoever we deal with, 
accepting our actual companions and circumstances, 
however humble or odious, as the mystic officials to 
whom the universe has delegated its whole pleasure for 
us. If these are mean and malignant, their content- 
ment, which is the last victory of justice, is a more 
satisfying echo to the heart, than the voice of poets 
and the casual, sympathy of admirable persons. I 
think that however a thoughtful man may suffer from 
the defects and absurdities of his company, he cannot 
without affectation deny to any set of men and women, 
a sensibility to extraordinary merit. The coarse and 
frivolous have an instinct of superiority, if they have 
not a sympathy, and honor it in their blind capricious 
way with sincere homage. 

The fine young people despise life, but in me, and 
in such as with me are free from dyspepsia, and to 
whom a day is a sound and solid good, it is a great 
excess of politeness to look scornful and to cry for 
company. I am grown by sympathy a little eager 
and sentimental, but leave me alone, and I should rel- 
ish every hour and what it brought me, the potluck of 
the day, as heartily as the oldest gossip in the bar- 
room. I am thankful for small mercies. I compared 
notes with one of my friends who expects everything 
of the universe, and is disappointed when anything is 



340 



ESSAY IL 



less than the best, and I found that I begin at the 
other extreme, expecting nothing, and am always full 
of thanks for moderate goods. I accept the clangor 
and jangle of contrary tendencies. I find my account 
in sots and bores also. They give a reality to the cir- 
cumjacent picture, which such a vanishing meteorous 
appearance can ill spare. In the morning I awake, 
and find the old world, wife, babes, and mother, Con- 
cord and Boston, the dear old spiritual world, and 
even the dear old devil not far off*. If we will take 
the good we find, asking no questions, we shall have 
heaping measures. The great gifts are not got by 
analysis. Everything good is on the highway. The 
middle region of our being is the temperate zone. 
We may climb into the thin and cold realm of pure 
geometry and lifeless science, or sink into that of sen- 
sation. Between these extremes is the equator of life, 
of thought, of spirit, of poetry, — a narrow belt. 
Moreover, in popular experience, everything good is 
on the highway. A collector, peeps into all the picture- 
shops of Europe, for a landscape of Poussin, a crayon- 
sketch of Salvator ; but the Transfiguration, the Last 
Judgment, the Communion of St. Jerome, and what 
are as transcendent as these, are on the walls of the 
Vatican, the Uffizii, or the Louvre, where every foot- 
man may see them ; to say nothing of nature's pictures 
in every street, of sunsets and sunrises every day, and 
the sculpture of the human body never absent. A col- 
lector recently bought at public auction, in London, 
for one hundred and fifty-seven guineas, an autograph 
of Shakespeare : but for nothing a school-boy can read 
Hamlet, and can detect secrets of highest concernment 



EXPERIENCE. 341 

yet unpublished therein. I think I will never read 
any but the commonest books, — the Bible, Homer, 
Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton. Then we are impa- 
tient of so public a life and planet, and run hither and 
thither for nooks and secrets. The imagination de- 
lights in the woodcraft of Indians, trappers, and bee- 
hunters. We fancy that we are strangers, and not so 
intimately domesticated in the planet as the wild man, 
and the wild beast and bird. But the exclusion 
reaches them also ; reaches the climbing, flying, glid- 
ing, feathered, and four-footed man. Fox and wood- 
chuck, hawk and snipe, and bittern, when nearly seen, 
have no more root in the deep world than man, and 
are just such superficial tenants of the globe. Then 
the new molecular philosophy shows astronomical in- 
terspaces betwixt atom and atom, shows that the 
world is all outside : it has no inside. 

The mid-world is best. Nature, as we know her, 
is no saint. The lights of the church, the ascetics, 
Gentoos and corn-eaters, she does not distinguish by 
any favor. She comes eating and drinking and sin- 
ning. Her darlings, the great, the strong, the beau- 
tiful, are not children of our law, do not come out of 
the Sunday School, nor weigh their food, nor punc- 
tually keep the commandments. If we will be strong 
with her strength, we must not harbor such disconso- 
late consciences, borrowed too from the consciences of 
other nations. We must set up the strong present 
tense against all the rumors of wrath, past or to come. 
So many things are unsettled which it is of the first 
importance to settle, — and, pending their settlement, 
vve will do as we do. Whilst the debate goes forward 



342 ESSAY IL 

on the equity of commerce, and will not be closed for 
a century or two, New and Old England may keep 
shop. Law of copyright and international copyright 
is to be discussed, and, in the interim, we will sell our 
books for the most we can. Expediency of literature, 
reason of literature, lawfulness of writing down a 
thought, is questioned ; much is to say on both sides, 
and, while the fight waxes hot, thou, dearest scholar, 
stick to thy foolish task, add a line every hour, and be- 
tween whiles add a line. Right to hold land, right of 
property, is disputed, and the conventions convene, 
and before the vote is taken, dig away in your garden, 
and spend your earnings as a waif or godsend to all 
serene and beautiful purposes. Life itself is a bubble 
and a scepticism, and a sleep within a sleep. Grant 
it, and as much more as they will, — but thou, God's 
darling ! heed thy private dream : thou wilt not be 
missed in the scorning and scepticism : there are 
enough of them : stay there in thy closet, and toil, 
until the rest are agreed what to do about it. Thy 
sickness, they say, and thy puny habit, require that 
thou do this or avoid that, but know that thy life is a 
flitting state, a tent for a night, and do thou, sick or 
well, finish that stint. Thou art sick, but shalt not be 
worse, and the universe, which holds thee dear, shall 
be the better. 

Human life is made up of the two elements, power 
and form, and the proportion must be invariably kept 
if we would have it sweet and sound. Each of these 
elements in excess makes a mischief as hurtful as its 
defect. Everything runs to excess : every good qual- 
ity is noxious, if unmi;sed, and, to carry the danger 



EXPERIENCE. 343 

to the edge of ruin, nature causes each man^s peculiar- 
ity to superabound. Here, among the farms, we 
adduce the scholars as examples of this treachery. 
They are nature's victims of expression. You who 
see the artist, the orator, the poet, too near, and find 
their life no more excellent than that of mechanics or 
farmers, and themselves victims of partiality, very 
hollow and haggard, and pronounce them failures, — 
not heroes, but quacks, — conclude very reasonably, 
that these arts are not for man, but are disease. Yet 
nature will not bear you out. Irresistible nature 
made men such, and makes legions more of such, 
every day. You love the boy reading in a book, gaz- 
ing at a drawing, or a cast : yet what are these mil- 
lions who read and behold, but incipient writers and 
sculptors ? Add a little more of that quality which 
now reads and sees, and they will seize the pen and 
chisel. And if one remembers how innocently he 
began to be an artist, he perceives that nature joined 
with his enemy. A man is a golden impossibility. 
The line he must walk is a hair's breadth. The wise 
through excess of wisdom is made a fool. 

How easily, if fate would suffer it, we might keep 
forever these beautiful limits, and adjust ourselves, 
once for all, to the perfect calculation of the kingdom 
of known cause and effect. In the street and in the 
newspapers, life appears so plain a business, that manly 
resolution and adherence to the multiplication-table 
through all weathers will insure success. But ah ! 
presently comes a day, or is it only a half-hour, with 
its angel-whispering, — which discomfits the conclu- 



344 



JESS AY 11. 



sions of nations and of years ! To-morrow again, 
everything looks real and angular, the habitual stand- 
ards are reinstated, common sense is as rare as genius, 
— is the basis of genius, and experience is hands and 
feet to every enterprise ; — and yet, he who should do 
his business on this understanding, would be quickly 
bankrupt. Power keeps quite another road than the 
turnpikes of choice and will ; namely, the subterranean 
and invisible tunnels and channels of life. It is 
ridiculous that we are diplomatists, and doctors, and 
considerate people ; there are no dupes like these. 
Life is a series of surprises, and would not be worth 
taking or keeping, if it were not. God delights to 
isolate us every day, and hide from us the past and the 
future. We would look about us, but with grand po- 
liteness he draws down before us an impenetrable 
screen of purest sky, and another behind us of purest 
sky. " You will not remember," he seems to say, 
" and you will not expect." All good conversation, 
manners, and action, come from a spontaneity which 
forgets usages, and makes the moment great. Nature 
hates calculators ; her methods are saltatory and im- 
pulsive. Man lives by pulses ; our organic move- 
ments are such ; and the chemical and ethereal agents 
are undulatory and alternate; and the mind goes 
antagonizing on, and never prospers but by fits. We 
thrive by casualties. Our chief experiences have been 
casual. The most attractive class of people are those 
who are powerful obliquely, and not by the direct, 
stroke : men of genius, but not yet accredited : one 
gets the cheer of their light, without paying too great 
a tax. Theirs is the beauty of the bird, or the morn- 



EXPERIENCE. 345 

ing light, and not of art. In the thought of genius 
there is always a surprise ; and the moral sentiment 
is well called " the newness," for it is never other ; as 
new to the oldest intelligence as to the young child, 
— " the kingdom that cometh without observation." 
In like manner, for practical success, there must not 
be too much design. A man will not be observed in 
doing that which he can do best. There is a certain 
magic about his properest action, which stupefies your 
powers of observation, so that though it is done be- 
fore you, you wist not of it. The art of life has a 
pudency, and will not be exposed. Every man is an 
impossibility, until he is born ; everything impossible, 
until we see a success. The ardors of piety agree at 
last with the coldest scepticism, — that nothing is of 
us or our works, — that all is of God. Nature will 
not spare us the smallest leaf of laurel. All writing 
comes by the grace of God, and all doing and having. 
I would gladly be moral, and keep due metes and 
bounds, which I dearly love, and allow the most to 
the will of man, but I have set my heart on honesty 
in this chapter, and I can see nothing at last, in suc- 
cess or failure, than more or less of vital force supplied 
from the Eternal. The results of life are uncalculated 
and uncalculable. The years teach much which the 
days never know. The persons who compose our 
company, converse, and come and go, and design and 
execute many things, and somewhat comes of it all, 
but an unlookcd for result. The individual is always 
mistaken. He designed many things, and drew in 
other persons as coadjutors, quarrelled with some or 
all, blundered much, and something is done ; all are 



346 ESSAY 11. 

a little advanced, but the individual is always misT 
taken. It turns out somewhat new, and very unlike 
what he promised himself. 

The ancients, struck with this irreducibleness of the 
elements of human life to calculation, exalted Chance 
into a divinity, but that is to stay too long at the 
spark, — which glitters truly at one point, — but the 
universe is warm with the latency of the same fire. 
The miracle of life which will not be expounded, but 
will remain a miracle, introduces a new element. In 
the growth of the embryo. Sir Everard Home, I think, 
noticed that the evolution was not from one central 
point, but coactive from three or more points. Life 
has no memory. That which proceeds in succession 
might be remembered, but that which is co-existent, or 
ejaculated from a deeper cause, as yet far from being 
conscious, knows not its own tendency. So is it with 
us, now sceptical, or without unity, because immersed 
in forms and effects all seeming to be of equal yet 
hostile value, and now religious, whilst in the recep- 
tion of spiritual law. Bear with these distractions, 
with this coetaneous growth of the parts ; they will 
one day be members y and obey one will. On that one 
will, on that secret cause, they nail our attention and 
hope. Life is hereby melted into an expectation or a 
religion. Underneath the inharmonious and trivial 
particulars, is a musical perfection, the Ideal journey- 
ing always with us, the heaven without rent or seam. 
Do but observe the mode of our illumination. When 
I converse with a profound mind, or if at any time 
being alone I have good thoughts, I do not at once 



EXPERIENCE. 



347 



arrive at satisfactions, as when, being thirsty, I drink 
water, or go to the fire, being cold : no ! but I am at 
first apprised of my vicinity to a new and excellent 
region of life. By persisting to read or to think, this 
region gives further sign of itself, as it were in flashes 
of light, in sudden discoveries of its profound beauty 
and repose, as if the clouds that covered it parted at 
intervals, and showed the approaching traveller the 
inland mountains, with the tranquil eternal meadows 
spread at their base, whereon flocks graze, and shep- 
herds pipe and dance. But every insight from this 
realm of thought is felt as initial, and promises a se- 
quel. I do not make it ; I arrive there, and behold 
what was there already. I make ! O no ! I clap my 
hands in infantine joy and amazement, before the first 
opening to me of this august magnificence, old with 
the love and homage of innumerable ages, young with 
the life of life, the sunbright Mecca of the desert. 
And what a future it opens ! I feel a new heart beat- 
ing with the love of the new beauty. I am ready to 
die out of nature, and be born again into this new yet 
unapproachable America I have found in the West. 

*' Since neither now nor yesterday began 
These thoughts, which have been ever, nor yet can 
A man be found who their first entrance knew." 

If I have described life as a flux of moods, I must now 
add, that there is that in us which changes not, and 
which ranks all sensations and states of mind. The 
consciousness in each man is a sliding scale, which 
identifies him now with the First Cause, and now 
with the flesh of his body ; life above life, in infinite 
degrees. The sentiment from which it sprung deter- 



348 JSSSAY II. 

mines the dignity of any deed, and the question ever 
is, not, what you have done or forborne, but, at whose 
command you have done or forborne it. 

Fortune, Minerva, Muse, Holy Ghost, — these are 
quaint names, too narrow to cover this unbounded 
substance. The baffled intellect must still kneel be- 
fore this cause, which refuses to be named, — ineffable 
cause, which every fine genius has essayed to repre- 
sent by some emphatic symbol, as, Thales by water, 
Anaximenes by air, Anaxagoras by (Nous) thought^ 
Zoroaster by fire, Jesus and the moderns by love : and 
the metaphor of each has become a national religion. 
The Chinese Mencius has not been the least success- 
ful in his generalization. "I fully understand lan- 
guage," he said, '^and nourish well my vast-flowing 
vigor." — ''I beg to ask what you call vast-flowing 
vigor ? " — said his companion. " The explanation," 
replied Mencius, "is difficult. This vigor is supreme- 
ly great, and in the highest degree unbending. Nour- 
ish it correctly, and do it no injury, and it will fill up 
the vacancy between heaven and earth. This vigor 
accords with and assists justice and reason, and leaves 
no hunger." — In our more correct writing, we give 
to this generalization the name of Being, and thereby 
confess that we have arrived as far as we can go. 
Suffice it for the joy of the universe, that we have not 
arrived at a wall, but at interminable oceans. Our 
life seems not present, so much as prospective; not 
for the affairs on which it is wasted, but as a hint of 
this vast-flowing vigor. Most of life seems to be mere 
advertisement of faculty : information is given us not 
to sell ourselves cheap ; that we are very great. So, 



EXPERIENCE, 349 

in particulars, our greatness is always in a tendency 
or direction, not in an action. It is for us to believe 
in the rule, not in the exception. The noble are thus 
known from the ignoble. So in accepting the leading 
of the sentiments, it is not what we believe concern- 
ing the immortality of the soul, or the like, but the uni- 
versal impulse to believe, that is the material circumstance, 
and is the principal fact in the history of the globe. 
Shall we describe this cause as that which works di- 
rectly ? The spirit is not helpless or needful of medi- 
ate organs. It has plentiful powers and direct effects. 
I am explained without explaining, I am felt without 
acting, and where I am not. Therefore all just per- 
sons are satisfied with their own praise. They refuse 
to explain themselves, and are content that new ac- 
tions should do them that office. They believe that 
we communicate without speech, and above speech, 
and that-no right action of ours is quite unafFecting to 
our friends, at whatever distance ; for the influence of 
action is not to be measured by miles. Why should 
I fret myself, because a circumstance has occurred, 
which hinders my presence where I was expected ? 
If I am not at the meeting, my presence where I am, 
should be as useful to the commonwealth of friendship 
and wisdom, as would be my presence in that place. 
I exert the same quality of power in all places. Thus 
journeys the mighty Ideal before us ; it never was 
known to fall into the rear. No man ever came to an 
experience which was satiating, but his good is ti- 
dings of a better. Onward and onward ! In liberated 
moments, we know that a new picture of life and duty 
is already possible ; the elements already exist in 



350 ESSAY 11. 

many minds around you, of a doctrine of life which 
shall transcend any written record we have. The 
new statement will comprise the scepticisms, as well 
as the faiths of society, and out of unbeliefs a creed 
shall be formed. For, scepticisms are not gratuitous 
or lawless, but are limitations of the affirmative state- 
ment, and the new philosophy must take them in, and 
make affirmations outside of them, just as much as it 
must include the oldest beliefs. 

It is very unhappy, but too late to be helped, the 
discovery we have made, that we exist. That discov- 
ery is called the Fall of Man. Ever afterwards, we 
suspect our instruments. We have learned that we 
do not see directly, but mediately, and that we have 
no means of correcting these colored and distorting 
lenses which we are, or of computing the amount of 
their errors. Perhaps these subject-lenses have a crea- 
tive power; perhaps there are no objects. Once we 
lived in what we saw ; now, the rapaciousness of this 
new power, which threatens to absorb all things, 
engages us. Nature, art, persons, letters, religions, 
— objects, successively tumble in, and God is but one 
of its ideas. Nature and literature are subjective phe- 
nomena ; every evil and every good thing is a shadow 
which we cast. The street is full of humiliations to 
the proud. As the fop contrived to dress his bailiffs in 
his livery, and make them wait on his guests at table, 
so the chagrins which the bad heart gives off as bub- 
bles, at once take form as ladies and gentlemen in the 
street, shopmen or bar-keepers in hotels, and threaten 
or insult whatever is threatenable and insultable in us. 
'Tis the same with our idolatries. People forget that 



EXPERIENCE, 351 

it is the eye which makes the horizon, and the round- 
ing mind's eye which makes this or that man a type 
or representative of humanity with the name of hero 
or saint. Jesus the "providential man/' is a good 
man on whom many people are agreed that these op- 
tical laws shall take effect. By love on one part, and 
by forbearance to press objection on the other part, 
it is for a time settled, that we will look at him in the 
centre of the horizon, and ascribe to him the proper- 
ties that will attach to any man so seen. But the 
longest love or aversion has a speedy term. The 
great and crescive self, rooted in absolute nature, sup- 
plants all relative existence, and ruins the kingdom 
of mortal friendship and love. Marriage (in what is 
called the spiritual world) is impossible, because of 
the inequality between every subject and every object. 
The subject is the receiver of Godhead, and at every 
comparison must feel his being enhanced by that cryp- 
tic might. Though not in energy, yet by presence, 
this magazine of substance cannot be otherwise than 
felt : nor can any force of intellect attribute to the 
object the proper deity which sleeps or wakes forever 
in every subject. Never can love make consciousness 
and ascription equal in force. There will be the same 
gulf between every me and thee, as between the orig- 
inal and the picture. The universe is the bride of the 
soul. All private sympathy is partial. Two human 
beings are like globes, which can touch only in a 
point, and, whilst they remain in contact, all other 
points of each of the spheres are inert ; their turn 
must also come, and the longer a particular union 
lasts, the more energy of appetency the parts not in 
union acquire. 



352 ESSAY 11. 

Life will be imaged, but cannot be divided nor 
doubled. Any invasion of its unity would be chaos. 
The soul is not twin-born, but the only begotten, and 
though revealing itself as child in time, child in appear- 
ance, is of a fatal and universal power, admitting no 
co-life. Every day, every act betrays the ill-concealed 
deity. We believe in ourselves, as we do not believe 
in others. We permit all things to ourselves, and that 
which we call sin in others, is experiment for us. It 
is an instance of our faith in ourselves, that men nev- 
er speak of crime as lightly as they think : or, every 
man thinks a latitude safe for himself, which is nowise 
to be indulged to another. The act looks very differ- 
ently on the inside, and on the outside ; in its quality, 
and in its consequences. Murder in the murderer is 
no such ruinous thought as poets and romancers will 
have it ; it does not unsettle him, or fright him from 
his ordinary notice of trifles : it is an act quite easy 
to be contemplated, but in its sequel, it turns out to 
be a horrible jangle and confounding of all relations. 
Especially the crimes that spring from love, seem right 
and fair from the actor's point of view, but, when 
acted, are found destructive of society. No man at 
last believes that he can be lost, nor that the crime in 
him is as black as in the felon. Because the intellect 
qualifies in our own case the moral judgments. For 
there is no crime to the intellect. That is antinomian 
or hypernomian, and judges law as well as fact. " It 
is worse than a crime, it is a blunder," said Napoleon, 
speaking the language of the intellect. To it, the world 
is a problem in mathematics or the science of quan- 
tity, and it leaves out praise and blame, and all weak 



EXPERIENCE, 353 

emotions. All stealing is comparative. If you come 
to absolutes, pray who does not steal ? Saints are sad, 
because they behold sin, (even when they speculate,) 
from the point of view of the conscience, and not of the 
intellect ; a confusion of thought. Sin seen from the 
thought, is a diminution or less : seen from the con- 
science or will, it is pravity or bad. The intellect names 
it shade, absence of light, and no essence. The con- 
science must feel it as essence, essential evil. This it 
is not : it has an objective existence, but no subjective. 
Thus inevitably does the universe wear our color, 
and every object fall successively into the subject 
itself. The subject exists, the subject enlarges ; all 
things sooner or later fall into place. As I am, so I 
see; use what language we will, we can never say 
anything but what we are ; Hermes, Cadmus, Colum- 
bus, Newton, Bonaparte, are the mind's ministers. 
Instead of feeling a poverty when we encounter a 
great man, let us treat the new comer like a travelling 
geologist, who passes through our estate, and shows 
us good slate, or limestone, or anthracite, in our brush 
pasture. The partial action of each strong mind in 
one direction is a telescope for the objects on which 
it is pointed. But every other part of knowledge is 
to be pushed to the same extravagance, ere the soul 
attains her due sphericity. Do you see that kitten 
chasing so prettily her own tail ? If you could look 
with her eyes, you might see her surrounded with 
hundreds of figures performing complex dramas, with 
tragic and comic issues, long conversations, many 
characters, many ups and downs of fate, — and mean- 
time it is only puss and her tail. How long before 
23 



354 ESSAY II. 

our masquerade will end its noise of tambourines, 
laughter, and shouting, and we shall find it was a 
solitary performance ? — A subject and an object, — 
it takes so much to make the galvanic circuit com- 
plete, but magnitude adds nothing. What imports 
it whether it is Kepler and the sphere, Columbus and 
America, a reader and his book, or puss with her tail ? 
It is true that all the muses and love and religion 
hate these developments, and will find a way to pun- 
ish the chemist, who publishes in the parlor the secrets 
of the laboratory. And we cannot say too little of 
our constitutional necessity of seeing things under 
private aspects, or saturated with our humors. And 
yet is the God the native of these bleak rocks. That 
need makes in morals the capital virtue of self-trust. 
We must hold hard to this poverty, however scanda- 
lous, and by more vigorous self-recoveries, after the 
sallies of action, possess our axis more firmly. The 
life of truth is cold, and so far mournful ; but it is 
not the slave of tears, contritions, and perturbations. 
It does not attempt another's work, nor adopt anoth- 
er's facts. It is a main lesson of wisdom to know 
your own from another's. I have learned that I can- 
not dispose of other people's facts ; but I possess such 
a key to my own, as persuades me against all their 
denials, that they also have a key to theirs. A sym- 
pathetic person is placed in the dilemma of a swimmer 
among drowning men, who all catch at him, and if he 
give so much as a leg or a finger, they will drown him. 
They wish to be saved from the mischiefs of their 
vices, but not from their vices. Charity would be 
wasted on this poor waiting on the symptoms. A 



EXPERIENCE, 355 

wise and hardy physician will say, Come out of that, as 
the first condition of advice. 

In this our talking America, we are ruined by our 
good nature and listening on all sides. This compli- 
ance takes away the power of being greatly useful. A 
man should not be able to look other than directly and 
forthright. A preoccupied attention is the only an- 
swer to the importunate frivolity of other people : an 
attention, and to an aim which makes their wants friv- 
olous. This is a divine answer, and leaves no appeal, 
and no hard thoughts. In Flaxman's drawing of the 
Eumenides of ^schylus, Orestes supplicates Apollo, 
whilst the furies sleep on the threshold. The face of 
the god expresses a shade of regret and compassion, 
but calm with the conviction of the irreconcilableness 
of the two spheres. He is born into other politics, into 
the eternal and beautiful. The man at his feet asks 
for his interest in turmoils of the earth, into which his 
nature cannot enter. And the Eumenides there lying 
express pictorially this disparity. The god is sur- 
charged with his divine destiny. 

Illusion, Temperament, Succession, Surface, Sur- 
prise, Reality, Subjectiveness, — these are threads on 
the loom of time, these are the lords of life. I dare 
not assume to give their order, but I name them as I 
find them in my way. I know better than to claim 
any completeness for my picture. I am a fragment, 
and this is a fragment of me. I can very confidently 
announce one or another law, which throws itself into 
relief and form, but I am too young yet by some ages 
to compile a code. I gossip for my hour concerning 



356 ESSAY IT. 

the eternal politics. I have seen many fair pictures 
not in vain. A wonderful time I have lived in. I am 
not the novice I was fourteen, nor yet seven years ago. 
Let who will ask, where is the fruit 1 I find a private 
fruit sufficient. This is a fruit, — that I should not 
ask for a rash effect from meditations, counsels, and 
the hiving of truths. I should feel it pitiful to de- 
mand a result on this town and county, an overt 
effect on the instant month and year. The effect is 
deep and secular as the cause. It works on periods in 
which mortal lifetime is lost. All I know is reception ; 
I am and I have : but I do not get, and when I have 
fancied I had gotten anything, I found I did not. I 
worship with wonder the great Fortune. My reception 
has been so large, that I am not annoyed by receiving 
this or that superabundantly. I say to the Genius, if he 
will pardon the proverb. In for a mill, in for a million. 
When I receive a new gift, I do not macerate my body 
to make the account square, for, if I should die, I 
could not make the account square. The benefit over- 
ran the merit the first day, and has overran the merit 
ever since. The merit itself, so-called, I reckon part 
of the receiving. 

Also, that hankering after an overt or practical ef- 
fect seems to me an apostasy. In good earnest, I am 
willing to spare this most unnecessary deal of doing. 
Life wears to me a visionary face. Hardest, roughest 
action is visionary also. It is but a choice between 
soft and turbulent dreams. People disparage knowing 
and the intellectual life, and urge doing. I am very 
content with knowing if only I could know. That is 
an august entertainment, and would suffice me a great 



EXPERIENCE, 357 

while. To know a little, would be worth the expense 
of this world. I hear always the law of Adrastia, 
" that every soul which had acquired any truth, should 
be safe from harm until another period." 

I know that the world I converse with in the city 
and in the farms, is not the world I think. I observe 
that difference, and shall observe it. One day, I shall 
know the value and law of this discrepance. But I have 
not found that much was gained by manipular attempts 
to realize the world of thought. Many eager persons 
successively make an experiment in this way, and 
make themselves ridiculous. They acquire democratic 
manners, they foam at the mouth, they hate and deny. 
Worse, I observe, that, in the history of mankind, 
there is never a solitary example of success, — taking 
their own tests of success. I say this polemically, or 
in reply to the inquiry, why not realize your world ? 
But far be from me the despair which prejudges the 
law by a paltry empiricism, — since there never was a 
right endeavor, but it succeeded. Patience and pa- 
tience, we shall win at the last. We must be very 
suspicious of the deceptions of the element of time. 
It takes a good deal of time to eat or to sleep, or to 
earn a hundred dollars, and a very little time to enter- 
tain a hope and an insight which becomes the light of 
our life. We dress our garden, eat our dinners, dis- 
cuss the household with our wives, and these things 
make no impression, are forgotten next week ; but in 
the solitude to which every man is always returning, 
he has a sanity and revelations, which in his passage 
into new worlds he will carry with him. Never mind 
the ridicule, never mind the defeat : up again, old 



358 ESSAY IT. 

heart ! — it seems to say, — there is victory yet for all 
justice; and the true romance which the world exists 
to realize, will be the transformation of genius into 
practical power. 



CHAKACTER. 



The sun set ; but set not his hope : 
Stars rose 5 his faith was earlier up : 
Fixed on the enormous galaxy, 
Deeper and older seemed his eye : 
And matched his sufferance sublime 
The taciturnity of time. 
He spoke, and words more soft than rain 
Brought the Age of Gold again : 
His action won such reverence sweet, 
As hid all measure of the feat. 



Work of his hand 
He nor commends nor grieves : 
Pleads for itself the fact ; 
As unrepenting Nature leaves 
Her every act. 



ESSAY in. 



CHARACTER. 




HAVE read that those who listened to 
Lord Chatham felt that there was some- 
thing finer in the man, than anything 
which he said. It has been complained of 
our brilliant English historian of the French Revolu- 
tion, that when he has told all his facts about Mirabeau, 
they do not justify his estimate of his genius. The 
Gracchi, Agis, Cleomenes, and others of Plutarch's 
heroes, do not in the record of facts equal their own 
fame. Sir Philip Sidney, the Earl of Essex, Sir 
Walter Raleigh, are men of great figure, and of few 
deeds. We cannot find the smallest part of the per- 
sonal weight of Washington, in the narrative of his 
exploits. The authority of the name of Schiller is too 
great for his books. This inequality of the reputation 
to the works or the anecdotes, is not accounted for by 
saying that the reverberation is longer than the thun- 
der-clap; but somewhat resided in these men which 
begot an expectation that outran all their perform- 
ance. The largest part of their power was latent. 
This is that which we call Character, — a reserved 
force which acts directly by presence, and without 



362 ESSAY III. 

means. It is conceived of as a certain undemonstra- 
ble force, a Familiar or Genius, by whose impulses 
the man is guided, but whose counsels he cannot im- 
part ; which is company for him, so that such men are 
often solitary, or if they chance to be social, do not 
need society, but can entertain themselves very well 
alone. The purest literary talent appears at one time 
great, at another time small, but character is of a stel- 
lar and undiminishable greatness. What others effect 
by talent or by eloquence, this man accomplishes by 
some magnetism. " Half his strength he put not 
forth." His victories are by demonstration of superi- 
ority, and not by crossing of bayonets. He conquers, 
because his arrival alters the face of affairs. " ' O 
lole ! how did you know that Hercules was a god ? ' 
'Because,' answered lole, *I was content the mo- 
ment my eyes fell on him. When I beheld Theseus, 
I desired that I might see him offer battle, or at least 
guide his' horses in the chariot-race ; but Hercules did 
not wait for a contest ; he conquered whether he stood, 
or walked, or sat, or whatever thing he did.' " Man, 
ordinarily a pendant to events, only half attached, and 
that awkwardly, to the world he lives in, in these ex- 
amples appears to share the life of things, and to be 
an expression of the same laws which control the tides 
and the sun, numbers and quantities. 

But to use a more modest illustration, and nearer 
home, I observe, that in our political elections, where 
this element, if it appears at all, can only occur in its 
coarsest form, we sufficiently understand its incompa- 
rable rate. The people know that they need in their 
representative much more than talent, namely, the 



CHARACTER, 363 

power to make his talent trusted. They cannot come 
at their ends by sending to Congress a learned, acute, 
and fluent speaker, if he be not one, who, before he 
was appointed by the people to represent them, was 
appointed by Almighty God to stand for a fact, — in- 
vincibly persuaded of that fact in himself, — so that the 
most confident and the most violent persons learn that 
here is resistance on which both impudence and terror 
are wasted, namely, faith in a fact. The men who 
carry their points do not need to inquire of their con- 
stituents what they should say, but are themselves the 
country which they represent : nowhere are its emo- 
tions or opinions so instant and true as in them; 
nowhere so pure from a selfish infusion. The constit- 
uency at home hearkens to their words, watches the 
color of their cheek, and therein, as in a glass, dresses 
its own. Our public assemblies are pretty good tests 
of manly force. Our frank countrymen of the west 
and south have a taste for character, and like to know 
whether the New-Englander is a substantial man, or 
whether the hand can pass through him. 

.The same motive force appears in trade. There are 
geniuses in trade, as well as in war, or the state, or 
letters ; and the reason why this or that man is fortu- 
nate, is not to be told. It lies in the man : that is all 
anybody can tell you about it. See him, and you 
will know as easily why he succeeds, as, if you see 
Napoleon, you would comprehend his fortune. In 
the new objects we recognize the old game, the habit 
of fronting the fact, and not dealing with it at second 
hand, through the perceptions of somebody else. Na- 
ture seems to authorize trade, as soon as you see the 



364 ESSAY III. 

natural merchant, who appears not so much a private 
agent, as her factor and Minister of Commerce. His 
natural probity combines with his insight into the 
fabric of society, to put him above tricks, and he com- 
municates to all his own faith, that contracts are of 
no private interpretation. The habit of his mind is 
a reference to standards of natural equity and public 
advantage ; atid he inspires respect, and the wish to 
deal with him, both for the quiet spirit of honor which 
attends him, and for the intellectual pastime which 
the spectacle of so much ability affords. This im- 
mensely stretched trade, which makes the capes of the 
Southern Ocean his wharves, and the Atlantic Sea his 
familiar port, centres in his brain only ; and nobody 
in the universe can make his place good. In his 
parlor, I see very well that he has been at hard work 
this morning, with that knitted brow, and that settled 
humor, which all his desire to be courteous cannot 
shake off. I see plainly how many firm acts have 
been done ; how many valiant noes have this day been 
spoken, when others would have uttered ruinous yeas. 
I see, with the pride of art, and skill of masterly ariUi- 
metic and power of remote combination, the conscious- 
ness of being an agent and playfellow of the original 
laws of the world. He too believes that none can 
supply him, and that a man must be born to trade, 
or he cannot learn it. 

This virtue draws the mind more, when it appears 
in action to ends not so mixed. It works with most 
energy in the smallest companies and in private rela- 
tions. In all cases, it is an extraordinary and incom^ 
putable agent. The excess of physical strength is 



CHARACTER. 365 

paralyzed by it. Higher natures overpower lower ones 
by affecting them with a certain sleep. The faculties 
are locked up, and offer no resistance. Perhaps that 
is the universal law. When the high cannot bring up 
the low to itself it benumbs it, as man charms down 
the resistance of the lower animals. Men exert on 
each other a similar occult power. How often has the 
influence of a true master realized all the tales of 
magic ! A river of command seemed to run down from 
his eyes into all those who beheld him, a torrent of 
strong sad light, like an Ohio, or Danube, which per- 
vaded them with his thoughts, and colored all events 
with the hue of his mind. "What means did you 
employ ? '^ was the question asked of the wife of Con- 
cini, in regard to her treatment of Mary of Medici ; 
and the answer was, " Only that influence which every 
strong mind has over a weak one." Cannot Caesar in 
irons shuffle off the irons, and transfer them to the per- 
son of Hippo or Thraso the turnkey? Is an iron 
handcuff so immutable a bond ? Suppose a slaver on 
the coast of Guinea should take on board a gang of 
negroes, which should contain persons of the stamp 
of Toussaint L'Ouverture ? or, let us fancy, under 
these swarthy masks he has a gang of Washingtons in 
chains. When they arrive at Cuba, will the relative 
order of the ship's company be the same 1 Is there 
nothing but rope and iron ? Is there no love, no rev- 
erence ? Is there never a glimpse of right in a poor 
slave-captain's mind ; and cannot these be supposed 
available to break, or elude, or in any manner over- 
match the tension of an inch or two of iron ring ? 
This is a natural power, like light and heat, and all 



366 JESSAY III. 

nature co-operates with it. The reason why we feel 
one man's presence, and do not feel another's, is as sim- 
ple as gravity. Truth is the summit of being ; justice 
is the application of it to affairs. All individual na- 
tures stand in a scale, according to the purity of this 
element in them. The will of the pure runs down 
from them into other natures, as water runs down 
from a higher into a lower vessel. This natural force 
is no more to be withstood, than any other natural 
force. We can drive a stone upward for a moment 
into the air, but it is yet true that all stones will for- 
ever fall ; and whatever instances can be quoted of un- 
punished theft, or of a lie which somebody credited, 
justice must prevail, and it is the privilege of truth to 
make itself believed. Character is this moral order 
seen through the medium of an individual nature. 
An individual is an encloser. Time and space, liber- 
ty and necessity, truth and thought, are left at large 
no longer. Now the universe is a close or pound. 
All things exist in the man tinged with the manners 
of his soul. With what quality is in him, he infuses 
all nature that he can reach ; nor does he tend to lose 
himself in vastness, but, at how long a curve soever, 
all his regards return into his own good at last. He 
animates all he can, and he sees only what he ani- 
mates. He encloses the world, as the patriot does his 
country, as a material basis for his character, and a 
theatre for action. A healthy soul stands united with 
the Just and the True, as the magnet arranges itself 
with the pole, so that he stands to all beholders like a 
transparent object betwixt them and the sun, and 
whoso journeys towards the sun, journeys towards 



CHARACTER. 367 

that person. He is thus the medium of the highest 
influence to all who are not on the same level. Thus, 
men of character are the conscience of the society to 
which they belong. 

The natural measure of this power is the resistance 
of circumstances. Impure men consider life as it is 
reflected in opinions, events, and persons. They can- 
not see the action, until it is done. Yet its moral ele- 
ment pre-existed in the actor, and its quality as right 
or wrong, it was easy to predict. Everything in na- 
ture is bipolar, or has a positive and negative pole. 
There is a male and a female, a spirit and a fact, a 
north and a south. Spirit is the positive, the event is 
the negative. Will is the north, action the south pole. 
Character may be ranked as having its natural place 
in the north. It shares the magnetic currents of the 
system. The feeble souls are drawn to the south or 
negative pole. They look at the profit or hurt of the 
action. They never behold a principle until it is 
lodged in a person. They do not wish to be lovely, 
but to be loved. Men of character like to hear of their 
faults : the other class do not like to hear of faults ; 
they worship events; secure to them a fact, a connec- 
tion, a certain chain of circumstances, and they will 
ask no more. The hero sees that the event is ancil- 
lary : it must follow him. A given order of events 
has no power to secure to him the satisfaction which 
the imagination attaches to it; the soul of goodness 
escapes from any set of circumstances, whilst prosper- 
ity belongs to a certain mind, and will introduce that 
power and victory which is its natural fruit, into any 
order of events. No change of circumstances can re- 



368 ESSAY III. 

pair a defect of character. We boast our emancipa- 
tion from many superstitions ; but if we have broken 
any idols, it is through a transfer of the idolatry. 
What have I gained that I no longer immolate a bull 
to Jove, or to Neptune, or a mouse to Hecate ; that I 
do not tremble before the Eumenides, or the Catholic 
Purgatory, or the Calvinistic Judgment-day, — if I 
quake at opinion, the public opinion, as we call it ; or 
at the threat of assault, or contumely, or bad neigh- - 
bors, or poverty, or mutilation, or at the rumor of 
revolution, or of murder ? If I quake, what matters it 
what I quake at ? Our proper vice takes form in one 
or another shape, according to the sex, age, or tem- 
perament of the person, and, if we are capable of fear, 
will readily find terrors. The covetousness or the 
malignity which saddens me, when I ascribe it to soci- 
ety, is my own. I am always environed by myself. 
On the other part, rectitude is a perpetual victory, cel- 
ebrated not by cries of joy, but by serenity, which is 
joy fixed or habitual. It is disgraceful to fly to events 
for confirmation of our truth and worth. The capi- 
talist does not run every hour to the broker, to coin 
his advantages into current money of the realm ; he is 
satisfied to read in the quotations of the market, that 
his stocks have risen. The same transport which the 
occurrence of the best events in the best order would 
occasion me, I must learn to taste purer in the per- 
ception that my position is every hour meliorated, and 
does already command those events I desire. That 
exultation is only to be checked by the foresight of an 
order of things so excellent, as to throw all our pros- 
perities into the deepest shade. 



CHARACTER. 369 

The face which character wears to me is self-suffi- 
cingness. I revere the person who is riches ; so that 
I cannot think of him as alone, or poor, or exiled, or 
unhappy, or a client, but as perpetual patron, bene- 
factor, and beatified man. Character is centrality, the 
impossibility of being displaced or overset. A man 
should give us a sense of mass. Society is frivolous, 
and shreds its day into scraps, its conversation into 
ceremonies and escapes. But if I go to see an ingen- 
ious man, I shall think myself poorly entertained if he 
give me nimble pieces of benevolence and etiquette ; 
rather he shall stand stoutly in his place, and let me 
apprehend, if it were only his resistance ; know that I 
have encountered a new and positive quality ; — great 
refreshment for both of us. It is much, that he does 
not accept the conventional opinions and practices. 
That nonconformity will remain a goad and remem- 
brancer, and every inquirer will have to dispose of 
him, in the first place. There is nothing real or use- 
ful that is not a seat of war. Our houses ring with 
laughter, and personal and critical gossip, but it helps 
little. But the uncivil, unavailable man, who is a 
problem and a threat to society, whom it cannot let 
pass in silence, but must either worship or hate, — and 
to whom all parties feel related, both the leaders of 
opinion, and the obscure and eccentric, — he helps ; 
he puts America and Europe in the wrong, and de- 
stroys the scepticism which says, '< man is a doll, let us 
eat and drink, 'tis the best we can do," by illumi- 
nating the untried and unknown. Acquiescence in 
the establishment, and appeal to the public, indicate in- 
firm faith, heads which are not clear, and which must see 
24 



370 ESSAY III. 

a house built, before they can comprehend the plan of 
it. The wise man not only leaves out of his thought 
the many, but leaves out the few. Fountains, the 
self-moved, the absorbed, the commander because he 
is commanded, the assured, the primary, — they are 
good ; for these announce the instant presence of su- 
preme power. 

Our action should rest mathematically on our sub- 
stance. In nature, there are no false valuations. A 
pound of water in the ocean-tempest has no more grav- 
ity than in a midsummer pond. All things work ex- 
actly according to their quality, and according to their 
quantity; attempt nothing they cannot do, except 
man only. He has pretension : he wishes and attempts 
things beyond his force. I read in a book of English 
memoirs, "Mr. Fox (afterwards Lord Holland) said, 
he must have the Treasury ; he had served up to it, 
and would have it." — Xenophon and his ten thousand 
were quite equal to what they attempted, and did it ; 
so equal, that it was not suspected to be a grand and 
inimitable exploit. Yet there stands that fact unre- 
peated, a high-water-mark in military history. Many 
have attempted it since, and not been equal to it. It 
is only on reality, that any power of action can be 
based. No institution will be better than the institu- 
tor. I knew an amiable and accomplished person who 
undertook a practical reform, yet I was never able to 
find in him the enterprise of love he took in hand. 
He adopted it by ear and by the understanding from 
the books he had been reading. All his action was 
tentative, a piece of the city carried out into the fields^ 
and was the city still, and no new fact, and could not 



CHARACTER. 371 

inspire enthusiasm. Had there been something latent 
in the man, a terrible undemonstrated genius agitating 
and embarrassing his demeanor, we had watched for 
its advent. It is not enough that the intellect should 
see the evils, and their remedy. We shall still post- 
pone our existence, nor take the ground to which we 
are entitled, whilst it is only a thought, and not a 
spirit that incites us. We have not yet served up to it. 

These are properties of life, and another trait is the 
notice of incessant growth. Men should be intelligent 
and earnest. They must also make us feel, that they 
have a controlling happy future, opening before them, 
whose early twilights already kindle in the passing 
hour. The hero is misconceived and misreported; 
he cannot therefore wait to unravel any man's blun- 
ders : he is again on his road, adding new powers and 
honors to his domain, and new claims on your heart, 
which will bankrupt you, if you have loitered about 
the old things, and have not kept your relation to him, 
by adding to your wealth. New actions are the only 
apologies and explanations of old ones, which the no- 
ble can bear to offer or to receive. If your friend has 
displeased you, you shall not sit down to consider it, 
for he has already lost all memory of the passage, and 
has doubled his power to serve you, and, ere you can 
rise up again, will burden you with blessings. 

We have no pleasure in thinking of a benevolence 
that is only measured by its works. Love is inex- 
haustible, and if its estate is wasted, its granary emp- 
tied, still cheers and enriches, and the man, though he 
sleep, seems to purify the air, and his house to adorn 
the landscape and strengthen the laws. People always 



372 JESSAY IIL 

recognize this difference. We know who is benevolent, 
by quite other means than the amount of subscription 
to soup-societies. It is only low merits that can be 
enumerated. Fear, when your friends say to you 
what you have done well, and say it through; but 
when they stand with uncertain timid looks of respect 
and half-dislike, and must suspend their judgment for 
years to come, you may begin to hope. Those who 
live to the future must always appear selfish to those 
who live to the present. Therefore it was droll in the 
good Riemer, who has written memoirs of Goethe, to 
make out a list of his donations and good deeds, as, 
so many hundred thalers given to Stilling, to Hegel, 
to Tischbein; a lucrative place found for Professor 
Yoss, a post under the Grand Duke for Herder, a pen- 
sion for Meyer, two professors recommended to foreign 
universities, &c., &c. The longest list of specifications 
of benefit would look very short. A man is a poor 
creature, if he is to be measured so. For, all these, 
of course, are exceptions ; and the rule and hodiernal 
life of a good man is benefaction. The true charity 
of Goethe is to be inferred from the account he gave 
Dr. Eckermann, of the way in which he had spent his 
fortune. " Each bon-mot of mine has cost a purse of 
gold. Half a million of my own money, the fortune I 
inherited, my salary, and the large income derived 
from my writings for fifty years back, have been ex- 
pended to instruct me in what I now know. I have 
besides seen," &c. 

I own it is but poor chat and gossip to go to enu- 
merate traits of this simple and rapid power, and we are 
painting the lightning with charcoal ; but in these long 



CHARACTER, 373 

nights and vacations, I like to console myself so. 
Nothing but itself can copy it. A word warm from 
the heart enriches me. I surrender at discretion. 
How death-cold is literary genius before this fire of 
life ! These are the touches that reanimate my heavy 
soul, and give it eyes to pierce the dark of nature. I 
find, where I thought myself poor, there was I most 
rich. Thence comes a new intellectual exaltation, to 
be again rebuked by some new exhibition of charac- 
ter. Strange alternation of attraction and repulsion ! 
Character repudiates intellect, yet excites it ; and char- 
acter passes into thought, is published so, and then is 
ashamed before new flashes of moral worth. 

Character is nature in the highest form. It is of no 
use to ape it, or to contend with it. Somewhat is 
possible of resistance, and of persistence, and of crea- 
tion, to this power, which will foil all emulation. 

This masterpiece is best where no hands but nature's 
have been laid on it. Care is taken that the greatly- 
destined shall slip up into life in the shade, with no 
thousand-eyed Athens to watch and blazon every new 
thought, every blushing emotion, of young genius. 
Two persons lately, — very young children of the most 
high God, — have given me occasion for thought. 
When I explored the source of their sanctity, and 
charm for the imagination, it seemed as if each an- 
swered, " From my nonconformity : I never listened 
to your people's law, or to what they call their gospel, 
and wasted my time. I was content with the simple 
rural poverty of my own : hence this sweetness : my 
work never reminds you of that; — is pure of that.'' 
And nature advertises me in such persons, that, in 



374 ESSAY IIL 

democratic America, she will not be democratized. 
How cloistered and constitutionally sequestered from 
the market and from scandal ! It was only this morn- 
ing, that I sent away some wild-flowers of these wood- 
gods. They are a relief from literature, — these fresh 
draughts from the sources of thought and sentiment ; 
as we read, in an age of polish and criticism, the first 
lines of written prose and verse of a nation. How 
captivating is their devotion to their favorite books, 
whether ^schylus, Dante, Shakespeare, or Scott, as 
feeling that they have a stake in that book : who touch- 
es that, touches them ; — and especially the total soli- 
tude of the critic, the Patmos of thought from which he 
writes, in unconsciousness of any eyes that shall ever 
read this writing. Could they dream on still, as an- 
gels, and not wake to comparisons, and to be flattered ! 
Yet some natures are too good to be spoiled by praise, 
and wherever the vein of thought reaches down into 
the profound, there is no danger from vanity. Solemn 
friends will warn them of the danger of the head^s 
being turned by the flourish of trumpets, but they can 
afford to smile. I remember the indignation of an elo- 
quent Methodist at the kind admonitions of a Doctor 
of Divinity, — " My friend, a man can neither be 
praised nor insulted." But forgive the counsels ; they 
are very natural. I remember the thought which oc- 
curred to me when some ingenious and spiritual foreign- 
ers came to America, was. Have you been victimized 
in being brought hither "? — or, prior to that, answer 
me this, " Are you victimizable '? " 

As I have said, nature keeps these sovereignties in 
her own hands, and however pertly our sermons and 



CHARACTER, 375 

disciplines would divide some share of credit, and teach 
that the laws fashion the citizen, she goes her own gait, 
and puts the wisest in the wrong. She makes very 
light of gospels and prophets, as one who has a great 
many more to produce, and no excess of time to spare 
on any one. There is a class of men, individuals of 
which appear at long intervals, so eminently endowed 
with insight and virtue, that they have been unani- 
mously saluted as divine, and who seem to be an 
accumulation of that power we consider. Divine per • 
sons are character born, or, to borrow a phrase from 
Napoleon, they are victory organized. They are usu- 
ally received with ill-will, because they are new, and 
because they set a bound to the exaggeration that has 
been made of the personality of the last divine person. 
Nature never rhymes her children, nor makes two men 
alike. When we see a great man, we fancy a resem- 
blance to some historical person, and predict the sequel 
of his character and fortune, a result which he is sure 
to disappoint. None will ever solve the problem of his 
character according to our prejudice, but only in his 
own high unprecedented way. Character wants room ; 
must not be crowded on by persons, nor be judged 
from glimpses got in the press of affairs or on few oc- 
casions. It needs perspective, as a great building. 
It may not, probably does not, form relations rapidly ; 
and we should not require rash explanation, either on 
the popular ethics, or on our own, of its action. 

I look on Sculpture as history. I do not think the 
Apollo and the Jove impossible in flesh and blood. 
Every trait which the artist recorded in stone, he had 
seen in life, and better than his copy. We .have seen 



376 ESSAY III. 

many counterfeits, but we are born believers in great 
men. How easily we read in old books, when men 
were few, of the smallest action of the patriarchs. We 
require that a man should be so large and columnar 
in the landscape, that it should deserve to be recorded, 
that he arose, and girded up his loins, and departed to 
such a place. The most credible pictures are those of 
majestic men who prevailed at their entrance, and con- 
vinced the senses ; as happened to the eastern magian 
who was sent to test the merits of Zertusht or Zoroas- 
ter. When the Yunani sage arrived at Balkh, the Per- 
sians tell us, Gushtasp appointed a day on which the 
Mobeds of every country should assemble, and a golden 
chair was placed for the Yunani sage. Then the be- 
loved of Yezdara, the prophet Zertusht, advanced into 
the midst of the assembly. The Yunani sage, on see- 
ing that chief, said, " This form and this gait cannot lie, 
and nothing but truth can proceed from them." Plato 
said, it was impossible not to believe in the children 
of the gods, " though they should speak without prob- 
able or necessary arguments." I should think my- 
self very unhappy in my associates, if I could not credit 
the best things in history. " John Bradshaw," says 
Milton, " appears like a consul, from whom the fasces 
are not to depart with the year ; so that not on the 
tribunal only, but throughout his life, you would re- 
gard him as sitting in judgment upon kings." I find 
it more creditable, since it is anterior information, that 
one man should know heaven, as the Chinese say, than 
that so many men should know the world. " The 
virtuous prince confronts the gods, without any mis- 
giving. He waits a hundred ages till a sage comes, 



CHARACTER, 377 

and does not doubt. He who confronts the gods, 
•without any misgiving, knows heaven ; he who waits 
a hundred ages until a ^age comes, without doubting, 
knows men. Hence the virtuous prince moves, and 
for ages shows empire the way." But there is no 
need to seek remote examples. He is a dull observer 
whose experience has not taught him the reality and 
force of magic, as well as of chemistry. The coldest 
precisian cannot go abroad without encountering in- 
explicable influences. One man fastens an eye on 
him, and the graves of the memory render up their 
dead ; the secrets that make him wretched either to 
keep or to betray, must be yielded; — another, and 
he cannot speak, and the bones of his body seem to 
lose their cartilages ; the entrance of a friend adds 
grace, boldness, and eloquence to him : and there are 
persons, he cannot choose but remember, who gave a 
transcendent expansion to his thought, and kindled 
another life in his bosom. 

What is so excellent as strict relations of amity, 
when they spring from this deep root ? The sufficient 
reply to the sceptic, who doubts the power and the 
furniture of man, is in that possibility of joyful inter- 
course with persons, which makes the faith and prac- 
tice of all reasonable men. I know nothing which 
life has to offer so satisfying as the profound good un- 
derstanding, which can subsist, after much exchange 
of good offices, between two virtuous men, each of 
whom is sure of himself, and sure of his friend. It is a 
happiness which postpones all other gratifications, and 
makes politics, and commerce, and churches cheap. 
For, when men shall meet as they ought, each a bene- 



378 ESSAY III. 

factor, a shower of stars, clothed with thoughts, with 
deeds, with accomplishments, it should be the festival 
of nature which all things anilounce. Of such friend- 
ship, love in the sexes is the first symbol, as all other 
things are symbols of love. Those relations to the 
best men, which, at one time, we reckoned the ro- 
mances of youth, become, in the progress of the char- 
acter, the most solid enjoyment. 

If it were possible to live in right relations with 
men ! — if we could abstain from asking anything of 
them, from asking their praise, or help, or pity, and 
content us with compelling them through the virtue 
of the eldest laws ! Could we not deal with a few per- 
sons, — .with one person, — after the unwritten stat- 
utes, and make an experiment of their efficacy ? Could 
we not pay our friend the compliment of truth, of si- 
lence, of forbearing ? Need we be so eager to seek 
him ? If we are related, we shall meet. It was a 
tradition of the ancient world, that no metamorphosis 
could hide a god from a god ; and there is a Greek 
verse which runs, — 

" The Gods are to each other not unknown." 

Friends also follow the laws of divine necessity ; they 
gravitate to each other, and cannot otherwise : — 

When each the other shall avoid, 
Shall each by each be most enjoyed. 

Their relation is not made, but allowed. The gods 
must seat themselves without seneschal in our Olym- 
pus, and as they can install themselves by seniority 
divine. Society is spoiled, if pains are taken, if the 
associates are brought a mile to meet. And if it be 



CHARACTER, 379 

not society, it is a mischievous, low, degrading jangle, 
though made up of the best. All the greatness of each 
is kept back, and every foible in painful activity, as if 
the Olympians should meet to exchange snuff-boxes. 

. Life goes headlong. We chase some flymg scheme, 
or we are hunted by some fear or command behind us. 
But if suddenly we encounter a friend, we pause ; our 
heat and hurry look foolish enough ; now pause, now 
possession, is required, and the power to swell the 
moment from the resources of the heart. The mo- 
ment is all, in all noble relations. 

A divine person is the prophecy of the mind ; a 
friend is the hope of the heart. Our beatitude waits 
for the fulfilment of these two in one. The ages are 
opening this moral force. All force is the shadow or 
symbol of that. Poetry is joyful and strong, as it 
draws its inspiration thence. Men write their names 
on the world, as they are filled with this. History 
has been mean ; our nations have been mobs ; we 
have never seen a man : that divine form we do not 
yet know, but only the dream and prophecy of such : 
we do not know the majestic manners which belong to 
him, which appease and exalt the beholder. We 
shall one day see that the most private is the most 
public energy, that quality atones for quantity, and 
grandeur of character acts in the dark, and succors 
them who never saw it. What greatness has yet 
appeared, is beginnings and encouragements to us in 
this direction. The history of those gods and saints 
which the world has written, and then worshipped, 
are documents and character. The ^ges have exulted 
in the manners of a youth who owed nothing to for- 



380 ESSAY IIL 

tune, and who was hanged at the Tyburn of his na- 
tion, who, by the pure quality of his nature, shed an 
epic splendor around the facts of his death, which has 
transfigured every particular into an universal symbol 
for the eyes of mankind. This great defeat is hith- 
erto our highest fact. But the mind requires a vic- 
tory to the senses, a force of character which will con- 
vert judge, jury, soldier, and king; which will rule 
animal and mineral virtues, and blend with the courses 
of sap, of rivers, of winds, of stars, and of moral 
agents. 

If we cannot attain at a bound to these grandeurs, 
at least, let us do them homage. In society, high ad- 
vantages are set down to the possessor, as disadvan- 
tages. It requires the more wariness in our private 
estimates. I do not forgive in my friends the failure 
to know a fine character, and to entertain it with 
thankful hospitality. When, at last, that which we 
have always longed for, is arrived, and shines on us 
with glad rays out of that far celestial land, then to 
be coarse, then to be critical, and treat such a visitant 
with the jabber and suspicion of the streets, argues a 
vulgarity that seems to shut the doors of heaven. 
This is confusion, this the right insanity, when the 
soul no longer knows its own, nor where its allegiance, 
its religion, are due. Is there any religion but this, 
to know, that, wherever in the wide desert of being, 
the holy sentiment we cherished has opened into a 
flower, it blooms for me 1 if none sees it, I see it ; I am 
aware, if I alone, of the greatness of the fact. "Whilst 
it blooms, I will keep sabbath or holy time, and sus- 
pend my gloom and my folly and jokes. Nature 



CHARACTER. 381 

is indulged by the presence of this guest. There are 
many eyes that can detect and honor the prudent and 
household virtues ; there are many that can discern 
Genius on his starry track, though the mob is incapa- 
ble ; but when that love which is all-suffering, all-ab- 
staining, all-aspiring, which has vowed to itself, that 
it will be a wretch and also a fool in this world, sooner 
than soil its white hands by any compliances, comes 
into our streets and houses, — only the pure and aspir- 
ing can know its face, and the only compliment they 
can pay it, is to own it. 



MANNERS. 



" How near to good is what is fair ! 
Which we no sooner see, 
But with the lines and outward air 
Our senses taken be. 

Again yourselves compose, 
And now put all the aptness on 
Of Figure, that Proportion 

Or Color can disclose ; 
That if those silent arts were lost, 
Design and Picture, they might boast 

From you a newer ground. 
Instructed by the heightening sense 
Of dignity and reverence 

In their true motions found." 

Ben Jonson. 



ESSAY IV. 



MANNERS. 




]ALF the world, it is said, knows not how 
the other half live. Our Exploring Expe- 
dition saw the Feejee-Islanders getting their 
dinner oiF human bones ; and they are said 
to eat their own wives and children. The husbandry 
of the modern inhabitants of Gournou (west of old 
Thebes) is philosophical to a fault. To set up their 
housekeeping, nothing is requisite but two or three 
earthern pots, a stone to grind meal, and a mat which 
is the bed. The house, namely, a tomb, is ready with- 
out rent or taxes. No rain can pass through the roof, 
and there is no door, for there is no want of one, as 
there is nothing to lose. If the house do not please 
them, they walk out and enter another, as there are 
several hundreds at their command. "It is somewhat 
singular,^' adds Belzoni, to whom we owe this account, 
"to talk of happiness among people who live in sepul- 
chres, among the corpses and rags of an ancient nation 
which they know nothing of." In the deserts of Bor- 
goo, the rock-Tibboos still dwell in caves, like clifF- 
swallows, and the language of these negroes is com- 
pared by their neighbors to the shrieking of bats, and. 
25 



386 ESSAY IV. 

to the whistling of birds. Again, the Bornoos hav6 
no proper names ; individuals are called after their 
height, thickness, or other accidental quality, and 
have nicknames merely. But the salt, the dates, the 
ivory, and the gold, for which these horrible regions 
are visited, find their way into countries, where the 
purchaser and consumer can hardly be ranked in one 
race with these cannibals and man-stealers ; countries 
where man serves himself with metals, wood, stone, 
glass, gum, cotton, silk, and wool; honors himself 
with architecture ; writes laws, and contrives to exe- 
cute his will through the hands of many nations ; and, 
especially, establishes a select society, running through 
all the countries of intelligent men, a self-constituted 
aristocracy, or fraternity of the best, which, without 
written law or exact usage of any kind, perpetuates 
itself, colonizes every new-planted island, and adopts 
and makes its own whatever personal beauty or extra- 
ordinary native endowment any where appears. 

What fact more conspicuous in modern history, than 
the creation of the gentleman '? Chivalry is that, and 
loyalty is that, and in English literature, half the drama, 
and all the novels, from Sir Philip Sidney to Sir Wal- 
ter Scott, paint this figure. The word gentleman, 
which, like the word Christian, must hereafter char- 
acterize the present and the few preceding centuries, 
by the importance attached to it, is a homage to per- 
sonal and incommunicable properties. Frivolous and 
fantastic additions have got associated with the name, 
but the steady interest of mankind in it must be 
attributed to the valuable properties which it desig- 
nates. An element which unites all the most forcible 



MANNERS. 387 

persons of every country ; makes them intelligible and 
agreeable to each other, and is somewhat so precise, 
that it is at once felt if an individual lack the masonic 
sign, cannot be any casual product, but must be an 
average result of the character and faculties univer- 
sally found in men. It seems a certain permanent 
average ; as the atmosphere is a permanent composi- 
tion, whilst so many gases are combined only to be 
decompounded. Comme il faut, is the Frenchman's 
description of good society, as we must be. It is a 
spontaneous fruit of talents and feelings of precisely 
that class who have most vigor, who take the lead in 
the world of this hour, and, though far from pure, far 
from constituting the gladdest and highest tone of 
human feeling, is as good as the whole society permits 
it to be. It is made of the spirit, more than of the 
talent of men, and is a compound result, into which 
every great force enters as an ingredient ; namely, vir- 
tue, wit, beauty, wealth, and power. 

There is something equivocal in all the words in 
use to express the excellence of manners and social 
cultivation, because the quantities are fluxional, and 
the last effect is assumed by the senses as the cause. 
The word gentleman has not any correlative abstract to 
express the quality. Gentility is mean, and gentilesse 
is obsolete. But we must keep alive in the vernacular, 
the distinction between fashion, a word of narrow and 
often sinister meaning, and the heroic character which 
the gentleman imports. The usual words, however, 
must be respected : they will be found to contain the 
root of the matter. The point of distinction in all 
this class of names, as courtesy, chivalry, fashion, and 



388 ESSAY IK 

the like, is, that the flower and fruit, not the grain of 
the tree, are contemplated. It is beauty which is the 
aim this time, and not worth. The result is now in 
question, although our words intimate well enough the 
popular feeling, that the appearance supposes a sub- 
stance. The gentleman is a man of truth, lord of his 
own actions, and expressing that lordship in his be- 
havior, not in any manner dependent and servile either 
on persons, or opinions, or possessions. Beyond this 
fact of truth and real force, the word denotes good- 
nature or benevolence : manhood first, and then gentle- 
ness. The popular notion certainly adds a condition 
of ease and fortune ; but that is a natural result of 
personal force and love, that they should possess and 
dispense the goods of the world. In times of violence, 
every eminent person must fall in with many oppor- 
tunities to approve his stoutness and worth ; therefore 
every man's name that emerged at all from the mass 
in the feudal ages, rattles in our ear like a flourish of 
trumpets. But personal force never goes out of fash- 
ion. That is still paramount to-day, and, in the 
moving crowd of good society, the men of valor and 
reality are known, and rise to their natural place. 
The competition is transferred from war to politics 
and trade, but the personal force appears readily 
enough in these new arenas. 

Power first, or no leading class. In politics and in 
trade, bruisers and pirates are of better promise than 
talkers and clerks. God knows that all sorts of gen- 
tlemen knock at the door; but whenever used in 
strictness, and with any emphasis, the name will be 
found to point at original energy. It describes a man 



MANNERS, 389 

standing in his own right, and working after untaught 
methods. In a good lord, there must first be a good 
animal, at least to the extent of yielding the incom- 
parable advantage of animal spirits. The ruling class 
must have^more, but they must have these, giving in 
every company the sense of power, which makes things 
easy to be done which daunt the wise. The society 
of the energetic class, in their friendly and festive 
meetings, is full of courage, and of attempts, which 
intimidate the pale scholar. The courage which girls 
exhibit is like a battle of Lundy^s Lane, or a sea-fight. 
The intellect relies on memory to make some supplies 
to face these extemporaneous squadrons. But mem- 
ory is a base mendicant with basket and badge, in the 
presence of these sudden masters. The rulers of soci- 
ety must be up to the work of the world, and equal to 
their versatile office : men of the right Caesarian pat- 
tern, who have great range of affinity. I am far from 
believing the timid maxim of Lord Falkland, (" that 
for ceremony there must go two to it ; since a bold 
fellow will go through the cunningest forms/^) and 
am of opinion that the gentleman is the bold fellow 
whose forms are not to be broken through ; and only 
that plenteous nature is rightful master, which is the 
complement of whatever person it converses with. 
My gentleman gives the law where he is ; he will out- 
pray saints in chapel, outgeneral veterans in the field, 
and outshine all courtesy in the hall. He is good 
company for pirates, and good with academicians ; so 
that it is useless to fortify yourself against him ; he 
has the private entrance to all minds, and I could as 
easily exclude myself, as him. The famous gentle- 



390 ESSAY IV. - 

men of Asia and Europe have been of this strong 
type : Saladin, Sapor, the Cid, Julius Caesar, Scipio, 
Alexander, Pericles, and the lordliest personages. 
They sat very carelessly in their chairs, and were too 
excellent themselves, to value any condition at a high 
rate. 

A plentiful fortune is reckoned necessary, in the 
popular judgment, to the completion of this man of 
the world : and it is a material deputy which walks 
through the dance which the first has led. Money is 
not essential, but this wide affinity is, which transcends 
the habits of clique and caste, and makes itself felt by 
men of all classes. If the aristocrat is only valid in 
fashionable circles, and not with truckmen, he will 
never be a leader in fashion ; and if the man of the 
people cannot speak on equal terms with the gentle- 
man, so that the gentleman shall perceive that he is 
already really of his own order, he is not to be feared. 
Diogenes, Socrates, and Epaminondas are gentlemen 
of the best blood, who have chosen the condition of 
poverty, when that of wealth was equally open to 
them. I use these old names, but the men I speak 
of are my contemporaries. Fortune will not supply 
to every generation one of these well-appointed knights, 
but every collection of men furnishes some example of 
the class : and the politics of this country, and the 
trade of eV^ery town, are controlled by these hardy and 
irresponsible doers, who have invention to take the 
lead, and a broad sympathy which puts them in fellow- 
ship with crowds, and makes their action popular. 

The manners of this class are observed and caught 
with devotion bv men of ta§te. The association of 



MANNERS, 391 

these masters with each other, and with men intel- 
ligent of their merits, is mutually agreeable and stim- 
ulating. The good forms, the happiest expressions 
of each, are repeated and adopted. By swift consent, 
everything superfluous is dropped, everything graceful 
is renewed. Fine manners show themselves formida- 
ble to the uncultivated man. They are a subtler 
science of defence to parry and intimidate ; but once 
matched by the skill of the other party, they drop the 
point of the sword, — points and fences disappear, and 
the youth finds himself in a more transparent atmos- 
phere, wherein life is a less troublesome game, and 
not a misunderstanding rises between the players. 
Manners aim to facilitate life, to get rid of impedi- 
ments, and bring the man pure to energize. They 
aid our dealing and conversation, as a railway aids 
travelling, by getting rid of all avoidable obstructions 
of the road, and leaving nothing to be conquered but 
pure space. These forms very soon become fixed, and 
a fine sense of propriety is cultivated with the more 
heed, that it becomes a badge of social and civil dis- 
tinctions. Thus grows up Fashion, an equivocal 
semblance, the most puissant, the most fantastic and 
frivolous, the most feared and followed, and which 
morals and violence assault in vain. 

There exists a strict relation between the class of 
power, and the exclusive and polished circles. Tlie 
last are always filled or filling from the first. The 
strong men usually give some allowance even to the 
petulances of fashion, for that afiinity they find in it. 
Napoleon, child of the revolution, destroyer of the old 
noblesse, never ceased to court the Faubourg St. Ger- 



392 ESSAY IV. 

main: doubtless with the feeling, that fashion is a 
homage to men of his stamp. Fashion, though in a 
strange way, represents all manly virtue. It is virtue 
gone to seed : it is a kind of posthumous honor. It 
does not often caress the great, but the children of the 
great : it is a hall of the Past. It usually sets its face 
against the great of this hour. Great men are not 
commonly in its halls : they are absent in the field : 
they are working, not triumphing. Fashion is made 
up of their children ; of those, who, through the value 
and virtue of somebody, have acquired lustre to their 
name, marks of distinction, means of cultivation and 
generosity, and, in their physical organization, a cer- 
tain health and excellence, which secures to them, if 
not the highest power to work, yet high power to 
enjoy. The class of power, the working heroes, the 
Cortez, the Nelson, the Napoleon, see that this is the 
festivity and permanent celebration- of such as they ; 
that fashion is funded talent ; is Mexico, Marengo, and 
Trafalgar, beaten out thin ; that the brilliant names 
of fashion run back to just such busy names as their 
own, fifty or sixty years ago. They are the sowers, 
their sons shall be the reapers, and their sons, in the 
ordinary course of things, must yield the possession 
of the harvest to new competitors with keener eyes 
and stronger frames. The city is recruited from the 
country. In the year 1805, it is said, every legitimate 
monarch in Europe was imbecile. The city would 
have died out, rotted, and exploded, long ago, but 
that it was reinforced from the fields. It is only 
country which came to town day before yesterday, that 
is city and court to-day. 



MANNERS. 393 

Aristocracy and fashion are certain inevitable re- 
sults. These mutual selections are indestructible. 
If they provoke anger in the least favored class, and 
the excluded majority revenge themselves on the ex- 
cluding minority, by the strong hand, and kill them, 
at once a new class finds itself at the top, as certainly 
as cream rises in a bowl of milk : and if the people 
should destroy class after class, until two men only 
were left, one of these would be the leader, and would 
be involuntarily served and copied by the other. You 
may keep this minority out of sight and out of mind, 
but it is tenacious of life, and is one of the estates of 
the realm. I am the more struck with this tenacity, 
when I see its work. It respects the administration 
of such unimportant matters, that we should not look 
for any durability in its rule. We sometimes meet 
men under some strong moral influence, as, a patri- 
otic, a literary, a religious movement, and feel that the 
moral sentiment rules man and nature. We think all 
other distinctions and ties w^ill be slight and fugitive, 
this of caste or fashion, for example : yet come from 
year to year, and see how permanent that is, in this 
Boston or New York life of man, where, too, it has 
not the least countenance from the law of the land. 
Not in Egypt or in India a firmer or more impassable 
line. Here are associations whose ties go over, and 
under, and through it, a meeting of merchants, a 
military corps, a college class, a fire-club, a profes- 
sional association, a political, a religious convention; 
— the persons seem to draw inseparably near ; yet, 
that assembly once dispersed, its members will not in 
the year meet again. Each returns to his degree in 



394 ESSAY IV. 

the scale of good society, porcelain remains porcelain 
and earthen earthen. The objects of fashion may be 
frivolous, or fashion may be objectless, but the nature 
of this union and selection can be neither frivolous 
nor accidental. Each man's rank in that perfect 
graduation depends on some symmetry in his structure, 
or some agreement in his structure to the symmetry 
of society. Its doors unbar instantaneously to a nat- 
ural claim of their own kind. A natural gentleman 
finds his way in, and will keep the oldest patrician 
out, who has lost his intrinsic rank. Fashion under- 
stands itself; good-breeding and personal superiority 
of Avhatever country readily fraternize with those of 
every other. The chiefs of savage tribes have distin- 
guished themselves in London and Paris, by the purity 
of their tournure. 

To say what good of fashion we can, — it rests on 
reality, and hates nothing so much as pretenders ; — 
to exclude and mystify pretenders, and send them in- 
to everlasting ' Coventry,' is its delight. We con- 
temn, in turn, every other gift of men of the world ; 
but the habit even in little and the least matters, of 
not appealing to any but our own sense of propriety, 
constitutes the foundation of all chivalry. There is 
almost no kind of self-reliance, so it be sane and pro- 
portioned, which fashion does not occasionally adopt, 
and give it the freedom of its saloons. A sainted 
soul is always elegant, and, if it will, passes unchal- 
lenged into the most guarded ring. But so will Jock 
the teamster pass, in some crisis that brings him 
thither, and find favor, as long as his head is not gid- 
dy with the new circumstance, and the iron shoes do 



MANNERS, 395 

not wish to dance in waltzes and cotillons. For there 
is nothing settled in manners, but the laws of behav- 
ior yield to the energy of the individual. The maid- 
en at her first ball, the countryman at a city dinner, 
believes that there is a ritual according to which every 
act and compliment must be performed, or the failing 
party must be cast out of this presence. Later, they 
learn that good sense and character make their own 
forms every moment, and speak or abstain, take wine 
or refuse it, stay or go, sit in a chair or sprawl with 
children on the floor, or stand on their head, or what 
else soever, in a new and aboriginal way : and that 
strong will is always in fashion, let who will be un- 
fashionable. All that fashion demands is composure, 
and self-content. A circle of men perfectly well-bred 
would be a company of sensible persons, in which 
every man's native manners and character appeared. 
If the fashionist have not this quality, he is noth- 
ing. We are such lovers of self-reliance, that we ex- 
cuse in a man many sins, if he will show us a com- 
plete satisfaction in his position, which asks no leave 
to be, of mine, or any man's good opinion. But any 
deference to some eminent man or woman of the 
world, forfeits all privilege of nobility. He is an un- 
derling : I have nothing to do with him ; I will speak 
with his master. A man should not go where he can- 
not carry his whole sphere or society with him, — not 
bodily, the whole circle of his friends, but atmospheri- 
cally. He should preserve in a new company the 
same attitude of mind and reality of relation, which 
his daily associates draw him to, else he is shorn of 
his best beams, and will be an orphan in the merriest 



396 ESSAY IV. 

club. " If you could see Vich Ian Vohr with his tail 

on ! " But Vich Ian Vohr must always carry 

his belongings in some fashion, if not added as honor, 
then severed as disgrace. 

There will always be in society certain persons who 
are mercuries of its approbation, and whose glance 
will at any time determine for the curious their stand- 
ing in the world. These are the chamberlains of the 
lesser gods. Accept their coldness as an omen of 
grace with the loftier deities, and allow them all their 
privilege. They are clear in their office, nor could 
they be thus formidable, without their own merits. 
But do not measure the importance of this class by 
their pretension, or imagine that a fop can be the dis- 
penser of honor and shame. They pass also at their 
just rate ; for how can they otherwise, in circles which 
exist as a sort of herald's office for the sifting of char- 
acter ? 

As the first thing man requires of man, is reality, 
so, that appears in all the forms of society. We 
pointedly, and by name, introduce the parties to each 
other. Know you before all heaven and earth, thai; 
this is Andrew, and this is Gregory ; — they look each 
other in the eye; they grasp each other's hand, to 
identify and signalize each other. It is a great satis- 
faction. A gentleman never dodges : his eyes look 
straight forward, and he assures the other party, first 
of all, that he has been met. For what is it that we 
seek, in so many visits and hospitalities ? Is it your 
draperies, pictures, and decorations ? Or, do we not 
insatiably ask, Was a man in the house? I may 
easily go into a great household where there is much 



MANNERS, 397 

substance, excellent provision for comfort, luxury, and 
; taste, and yet not encounter there any Amphitryon, 
who shall subordinate these appendages. I may go 
into a cottage, and find a farmer who feels that he is 
the man I have come to see, and fronts me accord- 
ingly. It was therefore a very natural point of old 
feudal etiquette, that a gentleman who received a 
visit, though it were of his sovereign, should not leave 
his roof, but should wait his arrival at the door of his 
house. No house, though it were the Tuileries, or 
the Escurial, is good for anything without a master. 
And yet we are not often gratified by this hospitality. 
Every body we know surrounds himself with a fine 
house, fine books, conservatory, gardens, equipage, and 
all manner of toys, as screens to interpose between 
himself and his guest. Does it not seem as if man 
was of a very sly, elusive nature, and dreaded nothing 
so much as a full rencontre front to front with his fel- 
low? It were unmerciful, I know, quite to abolish 
the use of these screens, which are of eminent conve- 
niencCj whether the guest is too great, or too little. 
We call together many friends who keep each other in 
play, or, by luxuries and ornaments we amuse the 
young people, and guard our retirement. Or if, per- 
chance, a searching realist comes to our gate, before 
whose eye we have no care to stand, then again we 
run to our curtain, and hide ourselves as Adam at the 
voice of the Lord God in the garden. Cardinal Ca- 
prara, the Pope's legate at Paris, defended himself 
from the glances of Napoleon, by an immense pair 
of green spectacles. Napoleon remarked them, and 
speedily managed to rally them off: and yet Napo- 



398 ESSAY IK 

leon, in his turn, was not great enough, with eight 
hundred thousand troops at his back, to face a pair of 
freeborn eyes, but fenced himself with etiquette, and 
within triple barriers of reserve : and, as all the world 
knows from Madame de Stael, was wont, when he 
found himself observed, to discharge his face of all ex- 
pression. But emperors and rich men are by no 
means the most skilful masters of good manners. 
No rent-roll nor army-list can dignify skulking and 
dissimulation : and the first point of courtesy must 
always be truth, as really all the forms of good breed- 
ing point that way. 

I have just been reading, in Mr. Hazlitt's transla- 
tion, Montaigne's account of his journey into Italy, 
and am struck with nothing more agreeably than the 
self-respecting fashions of the time. His arrival in 
each place, the arrival of a gentleman of France, is an 
event of some consequence. Wherever he goes, he 
pays a visit to whatever prince or gentleman of note 
resides upon his road, as a duty to himself and to civil- 
ization. When he leaves any house in which he has 
lodged for a few weeks, he causes his arms to be painted 
and hung up as a perpetual sign to the house, as was 
the custom of gentlemen. 

The complement of this graceful self-respect, and 
that of all the points of good breeding I most require 
and insist upon, is deference. I like that every chair 
should be a throne, and hold a king. I prefer a ten- 
dency to stateliness, to an excess of fellowship. Let 
the incommunicable objects of nature and the meta- 
physical isolation of man teach us independence. Let 
us not be too much acquainted. I would have a man 



MANNERS, 399 

enter his house through a hall filled with heroic and 
sacred sculptures, that he might not want the hint of 
tranquillity and self-poise. We should meet each morn- 
ing, as from foreign countries, and spending the day 
together, should depart at night, as into foreign coun- 
tries. In all things I would have the island of a man 
inviolate. Let us sit apart as the gods, talking from 
peak to peak all round Olympus. No degree of affec- 
tion need invade this religion. This is myrrh and 
rosemary to keep the other sweet. Lovers should 
guard their strangeness. If they forgive too much, all 
slides into confusion and meanness. It is easy to push 
this deference to a Chinese etiquette ; but coolness and 
absence of heat and haste indicate fine qualities. A 
gentleman makes no noise : a lady is serene. Propor- 
tionate is our disgust at those invaders who fill a stu- 
dious house with blast and running, to secure some 
paltry convenience. Not less I dislike a low sympathy 
of each with his neighbor's needs. Must we have a 
good understanding with one another's palates 7 as 
foolish people who have lived long together, know 
when each wants salt or sugar. I pray my compan- 
ion, if he wishes for bread, to ask me for bread, and if 
he wishes for sassafras or arsenic, to ask me for them, 
and not to hold out his plate, as if I knew already. 
Every natural function can be dignified by deliberation 
and privacy. Let us leave hurry to slaves. The com- 
pliments and ceremonies of our breeding should recall, 
however remotely, the grandeur of our destiny. 

The flower of courtesy does not very well bide hand- 
ling, but if we dare to open another leaf, and explore 
what parts go to its conformation, we shall find also 



400 ESSAY IV. 

an intellectual quality. To the leaders of men, the 
brain as well as the flesh and the heart must furnish 
a proportion. Defect in manners is usually the defect 
of fine perceptions. Men are too coarsely made for 
the delicacy of beautiful carriage and customs. It is 
not quite sufficient to good-breeding, a union of kind- 
ness and independence. We imperatively require a 
perception of, and a homage to beauty in our compan- 
ions. Other virtues are in request in the field and 
workyard, but a certain degree of taste is not to be 
spared in those we sit with. I could better eat with 
one who did not respect the truth or the laws, than 
with a sloven and unpresentable person. Moral qual- 
ities rule the world, but at short distances, the senses 
are despotic. The same discrimination of fit and fair 
runs out, if with less rigor, into all parts of life. The 
average spirit of the energetic class is good sense, ac- 
ting under certain limitations and to certain ends. It 
entertains every natural gift. Social in its nature, it 
respects every thing which tends to unite men. It 
delights in measure. The love of beauty is mainly 
the love of measure or proportion. The person who 
screams, or uses the superlative degree, or converses 
with heat, puts whole drawing-rooms to flight. If 
you wish to be loved, love measure. You must have 
genius, or a prodigious usefulness, if you will hide the 
want of measure. This perception comes in to polish 
and perfect the parts of the social instrument. So- 
ciety will pardon much to genius and special gifts, 
but, being in its nature a convention, it loves what is 
conventional, or what belongs to coming together. 
That makes the good and bad of manners, namely, 



MANNERS. 401 

what helps or hinders fellowship. For, fashion is not 
good sense absolute, but relative ; not good sense pri- 
vate, but good sense entertaining company. It hates 
corners and sharp points of character, hates quarrel- 
some, egotistical, solitary, and gloomy people; hates 
whatever can interfere with total blending of parties ; 
whilst it values all peculiarities as in the highest degree 
refreshing, which can consist with good fellowship. 
And besides the general infusion of wit to heighten 
civility, the direct splendor of intellectual power is 
ever welcome in fine society as the costliest addition to 
its rule and its credit. 

The dry light must shine in to adorn our festival, 
but it must be tempered and shaded, or that will also 
offend. Accuracy is essential to beauty, and quick 
perceptions to politeness, but not too quick perceptions. 
One may be too punctual and too precise. He must 
leave the omniscience of business at the door, when he 
comes into the palace of beauty. Society loves Creole 
natures, and sleepy, languishing manners, so that they 
cover sense, grace, and good-will : the air of drowsy 
strength, which disarms criticism; perhaps, because 
such a person seems to reserve himself for the best of 
the game, and not spend himself on surfaces ; an ig- 
noring eye, which does not see the annoyances, shifts, 
and inconveniences, that cloud the brow and smother 
the voice of the sensitive. 

Therefore, besides personal force and so much per- 
ception as constitutes unerring taste, society demands 
in its patrician class, another element already inti- 
mated, which it significantly terms good-nature, ex- 
pressing all degrees of generosity, from the lowest will- 
26 



402 i:SSAY IV. 

ingness and faculty to oblige, up .to the heights of 
magnanimity and love. Insight we must have, or we 
shall run against one another, and miss the way to 
our food ; but intellect is selfish and barren. The se- 
cret of success in society, is a certain heartiness and 
sympathy. A man who is not happy in the company, 
cannot find any word in his memory that will fit the 
occasion. All his information is a little impertinent. 
A man who is happy there, finds in every turn of the 
conversation equally lucky occasions for the introduc- 
tioQ of that which he has to say. The favorites of so- 
ciety, and what it calls whole souls, are able men, and 
of more spirit than wit, who have no uncomfortable 
egotism, but who exactly fill the hour and the compa- 
ny, contented and contenting, at a marriage or a fu- 
neral, a ball or a jury, a water -party or a shooting- 
match. England, which is rich in gentlemen, fur- 
nished, in the beginning of the present century, a good 
model of that genius which the world loves, in Mr. 
Fox, who added to his great abilities the most social 
disposition, and real love of men. Parliamentary his- 
tory has few better passages than the debate, in which 
Burke and Fox separated in the House of Commons ; 
when Fox urged on his old friend the claims of old 
friendship with such tenderness, that the House was 
moved to tears. Another anecdote is so close to my 
matter, that I must hazard the story. A tradesman 
who had long dunned him for a note of three hundred 
guineas, found him one day counting gold, and de- 
manded payment: ^^No," said Fox, "I owe this 
money to Sheridan : It is a debt of honor ; if an acci- 
dent should happen to me he has nothing to show." 



MANNERS, 403 

" Then," said the creditor, '^ I change my debt into a 
debt of honor, " and tore the note in pieces. Fox 
thanked the man for his confidence, and paid him, 
saying, his debt was of okler standing, and Sheridan 
must wait." Lover of liberty, friend of the Hindoo, 
friend of the African slave, he possessed a great per- 
sonal popularity ; and Napoleon said of him on the 
occasion of his visit to Paris, in 1805, "Mr. Fox will 
always hold the first place in an assembly at the Tuil- 
eries." 

We may easily seem ridiculous in our eulogy of cour- 
tesy, whenever we insist on benevolence as its founda- 
tion. The painted phantasm Fashion rises to cast a 
species of derision on what we say. But I will neither 
be driven from some allowance to Fashion as a sym- 
bolic institution, nor from the belief that love is the basis 
of courtesy. We must obtain that, if we can ; but by 
all means we must afiirm this. Life owes much of its 
spirit to these sharp contrasts. Fashion which aficcts 
to be honor, is often, in all men^s experience, only a 
ballroom-code. Yet, so long as it is the highest cir- 
cle, in the imagination of the best heads on the planet, 
there is something necessary and excellent in it ; for it 
is not to be supposed that men have agreed to be the 
dupes of anything preposterous ; and the respect which 
these mysteries inspire in the most rude and sylvan 
characters, and the curiosity with which details of 
high life are read, betray the universality of the love 
of cultivated manners. I know that a comic disparity 
would be felt, if we should enter the acknowledged 
"first circles," and apply these terrific standards of jus- 
tice, beauty, and benefit, to the individuals actually 



404 ESSAY IV. 

found there. Monarcns and heroes, sages and lovers, 
those gallants are not. Fashion has many classes and 
many rules of probation and admission ; and not the 
best alone. There is not only the right of conquest, 
which genius pretends, — the individual, demonstrat- 
ing his natural aristocracy best of the best ; — but less 
claims will pass for the time ; for Fashion loves lions, 
and points, like Circe, to her horned company. This 
gentleman is this afternoon arrived from Denmark; 
and that is my Lord Kide, who came yesterday from 
Bagdat; here is Captain Friese, from Cape Turn- 
again ; and Captain Symmes, from the interior of the 
earth; and Monsieur Jovaire, who came down this 
morning in a balloon ; Mr. Hobnail, the reformer ; and 
Reverend Jul Bat, who has converted the whole torrid 
zone in his Sunday school; and Signor Torre del 
Greco, who extinguished Vesuvius by pouring into it 
the Bay of Naples ; Spahi, the Persian ambassador ; 
and Tul Wil Shan, the exiled nabob of Nepaul, whose 
saddle is the new moon. — But these are monsters of 
one day, and to-morrow will be dismissed to their 
holes and dens ; for, in these rooms, every chair is 
waited for. The artist, the scholar, and, in general, 
the clerisy, wins its way up into these places, and gets 
represented here, somewhat on this footing of con- 
quest. Another mode is to pass through all the de- 
grees, spending a year and a day in St. Michael's 
Square, being steeped in Cologne water, and perfumed, 
and dined, and introduced, and properly grounded in 
all the biography, and politics, and anecdotes of the 
boudoirs. 

Yet these fineries may have grace and wit. Let 



MANNERS. 405 

there be grotesque sculpture about the gates and offi- 
ces of temples. Let the creed and commandments 
even have the saucj homage of parody. The forms 
of politeness universally express benevolence in super- 
lative degrees. What if they are in the mouths of 
selfish men, and used as means of selfishness ? What 
if the false gentleman almost bows the true out of the 
world ? What if the false gentleman contrives so to 
address his companion, as civilly to exclude all others 
from his discourse, and also to make them feel ex- 
cluded ? Eeal service will not lose its nobleness. All 
generosity is not merely French and sentimental ; nor 
is it to be concealed, that living blood and a passion 
of kindness does at last distinguish God's gentleman 
from Fashion's. The epitaph of Sir Jenkin Grout is 
not wholly unintelligible to the present age. " Here 
lies Sir Jenkin Grout, who loved his friend, and per- 
suaded his enemy : what his mouth ate, his hand paid 
for : what his servants robbed, he restored : if a wom- 
an gave him pleasure, he supported her in pain : he 
never forgot his children : and whoso touched his 
finger, drew after it his whole body." Even the line 
of heroes is not utterly extinct. There is still ever 
some admirable person in plain clothes, standing on 
the wharf, who jumps in to rescue a drowning man ; 
there is still some absurd inventor of charities ; some 
guide and comforter of runaway slaves ; some friend 
of Poland ; some Philhellene ; some fanatic who plants 
shade-trees for the second and third generation, and 
orchards when he is grown old ; some well-concealed 
piety ; some just man happy in an ill-fame ; some 
youth ashamed of the favors of fortune, and impa- 



4o6 i:SSAY IV, 

tiently casting them on other shoulders. And these 
are the centres of society, on which it returns for fresh 
impulses. These are the creators of Fashion, which 
is an attempt to organize beauty of behavior. The 
beautiful and the generous are, in the theory, the doc- 
tors and apostles of this church ; Scipio, and the Cid, 
and Sir Philip Sidney, and Washington, and every 
pure and valiant heart, who worshipped Beauty by 
word and by deed. The persons who constitute the 
natural aristocracy, are not found in the actual aris- 
tocracy, or, only on its edge ; as the chemical energy 
of the spectrum is found to be greatest just outside of 
the spectrum. Yet that is the infirmity of the senes- 
chals, who do not know their sovereign, when he ap- 
pears. The theory of society supposes the existence 
and sovereignty of these. It divines afar off their 
coming. It says with the elder gods, — 

" As Heaven and Earth are fairer far 
Than Chaos and blank Darkness, though once chiefs j 
And as we show beyond that Heaven and Earth, 
In form and shape compact and beautiful ; 
So, on our heels a fresh perfection treads ; 
A power, more strong in beauty, born of us, 
And fated to excel us as we pass 
In glory that old Darkness : 

for, 't is the eternal law, 

That first in beauty shall be fi.rst in might." 

Therefore, within the ethnical circle of good society, 
there is a narrower and higher circle, concentration of 
its light, and flower of courtesy, to which there is 
always a tacit appeal of pride and reference, as to its 
inner and imperial court, the parliament of love and 
chivalry. And this is constituted of those persons in 
whom heroic dispositions are native, with the love of 



MANNERS. 407 

beauty, the delight in society, and the power to em- 
bellish the passing day. K the individuals who com- 
pose the purest circles of aristocracy in Europe, the 
guarded blood of centuries, should pass in review, in 
such manner as that we could, at leisure, and critically 
inspect their behavior, we might find no gentleman, 
and no lady ; for, although excellent specimens of 
courtesy and high-breeding would gratify us in the 
assemblage, in the particulars, we should detect offence. 
Because, elegance comes of no breeding, but of birth. 
There must be romance of character, or the most fas- 
tidious exclusion of impertinencies will not avail. It 
must be genius which takes that direction : it must be 
not courteous, but courtesy. High behavior is as rare 
in fiction, as it is in fact. Scott is praised for the 
fidelity with which he painted the demeanor and con- 
versation of the superior classes. Certainly, kings 
and queens, nobles and great ladies, had some right 
to complain of the absurdity that had been put in 
their mouths, before the days of Waverley; but neither 
does Scott's dialogue bear criticism. His lords brave 
each other in smart epigrammatic speeches, but the 
dialogue is in costume, and does not please on the sec- 
ond reading : it is not w^arm with life. In Shake- 
speare alone, the speakers do not strut and bridle, the 
dialogue is easily great, and he adds to so many titles 
that of being the best-bred man in England, and in 
Christendom. Once or twice in a lifetime we are per- 
mitted to enjoy the charm of noble manners, in the 
presence of a man or woman who have no bar in their 
nature, but whose character emanates freely in their 
word and gesture. A beautiful form is better than a 



4o8 ESSAY IV. 

beautiful face; a beautiful behavior is better than a 
beautiful form : it gives a higher pleasure than stat- 
ues or pictures ; it is the finest of the fine arts. A 
man is but a little thing in the midst of the objects of 
nature, yet, by the moral quality radiating from his 
countenance, he may abolish all considerations of 
magnitude, and in his manners equal the majesty of 
the world. I have seen an individual, whose manners, 
though wholly within the conventions of elegant soci- 
ciety, were never learned there, but were original and 
commanding, and held out protection and prosperity ; 
one who did not need the aid of a court-suit, but car- 
ried the hoHday in his eye ; who exhilarated the fancy 
by flinging wide the doors of new modes of existence ; 
who shook off the captivity of etiquette, with happy, 
spirited bearing, good-natured and free as Robin 
Hood ; yet with the port of an emperor, — if need be, 
calm, serious, and fit to stand the gazje of millions. 

The open air and the fields, the street and public 
chambers, are the places where Man executes his will ; 
let him yield or divide the sceptre at the door of the 
house. Woman, with her instinct of behavior, in- 
stantly detects in man a love of trifles, any coldness 
or imbecility, or, in short, any want of that large, 
flowing, and magnanimous deportment, which is indis- 
pensable as an exterior in the hall. Our American 
institutions have been friendly to her, and at this mo- 
ment, I esteem it a chief felicity of this country, that it 
excels in women. A certain awkward consciousness 
of inferiority in the men, may give rise to the new 
chivalry in behalf of Woman's Rights. Certainly, let 
Iker be as much better placed in the laws and in social 



MANNERS. 409 

forms, as the most zealous reformer can ask, but I 
confide so entirely in her inspiring and musical nature, 
that I believe only herself can show us how she shall 
be served. The wonderful generosity of her senti- 
ments raises her at times into heroical and godlike 
regions, and verifies the pictures of Minerva, Juno, or 
Polymnia ; and, by the firmness with which she treads 
her upward path, she convinces the coarsest calculators 
that another road exists, than that which their feet 
know. But besides those who make good in our 
imagination the place of muses and of Delphic Sibyls, 
are there not women who fill our vase with wine and 
roses to the brim, so that the wine runs over and fills 
the house with perfume ; who inspire us with cour- 
tesy ; who unloose our tongues, and we speak ; who 
anoint our eyes, and we see? We say things we 
never thought to have said ; for once, our walls of 
habitual reserve vanished, and left us at large; we 
were children playing with children in a wide field of 
flowers. Steep us, we cried, in these influences, for 
days, for weeks, and we shall be sunny poets, and 
will write out in many-colored words the romance 
that you are. Was it Hafiz or Firdousi, that said of 
his Persian Lilla, She was an elemental force, and 
astonished me by her amount of life, when I saw her 
day after day radiating, every instant, redundant joy 
and grace onfall around her. She was a solvent pow- 
erful to reconcile all heterogeneous persons into one 
society : like air or water, an element of such a great 
range of affinities, that it combines readily with a thou- 
sand substances. Where she is present, all others 
will be more than they are wont. She was a unit and 



4IO ESSAY IV. 

whole, so that whatsoever she did, became her. She 
had too much sympathy and desire to please, than 
that you could say, her manners were marked with 
dignity, yet no princess could surpass her clear and 
erect demeanor on each occasion. She did not study 
the Persian grammar, nor the books of the seven poets, 
but all the poems of the seven seem to be written upon 
her. Eor, though the bias of her nature was not to 
thought, but to sympathy, yet was she so perfect in 
her own nature, as to meet intellectual persons by the 
fulness of her heart, warming them by her sentiments ; 
believing, as she did, that by dealing nobly with all, 
all would show themselves noble. 

I know that this Byzantine pile of chivalry or Fash- 
ion, which seems so fair and picturesque to those who 
look at the contemporary facts for science or for enter- 
tainment, is not equally pleasant to all spectators. 
The constitution of our society makes it a giant's cas- 
tle to the ambitious youth who have not found their 
names enrolled in its Golden Book, and whom it has 
excluded from its coveted honors and privileges. They 
have yet to learn that its seeming grandeur is shadowy 
and relative : it is great by their allowance ; its proud- 
est gates will fly open at the approach of their cour- 
age and virtue. For the present distress, however, of 
those who are predisposed to suiFer from the tyrannies 
of this caprice, there are easy remedies. To remove 
your residence a couple of miles, or at most four, will 
commonly relieve the most extreme susceptibility. For, 
the advantages which fashion values, are plants which 
thrive in very confined localities, in a few streets. 



MANNERS. 411 

namely. Out of this precinct, they go for nothing ; 
are of no use in the farm, in the forest, in the market, 
in war, in the nuptial society, in the literary or scien- 
tific circle, at sea, in friendship, in the heaven of thought 
or virtue. 

But we have lingered long enough in these painted 
courts. The worth of the thing signified must vindi- 
cate our taste for the emblem. Everything that is 
called fashion and courtesy humbles itself before the 
cause and fountain of honor, creator of titles and dig- 
nities, namely, the heart of love. This is the roy- 
al blood, this the fire, which, in all countries and con- 
tingencies, will work after its kind, and conquer and 
expand all that approaches it. This gives new mean- 
ings to every fact. This impoverishes the rich, suffer- 
ing no grandeur but its own. What is rich ? Are 
you rich enough to help anybody ? to succor the un- 
fashionable and the eccentric ? rich enough to make 
the Canadian in his wagon, the itinerant with his con- 
sul's paper which commends him " To the charitable," 
the swarthy Italian with his few broken words of Eng- 
lish, the lame pauper hunted by overseers from town 
to town, even the poor insane or besotted wreck of 
man or woman, feel the noble exception of your pres- 
ence and your house, from the general bleakness and 
stoniness ; to make such feel that they were greeted 
with a voice which made them both remember and 
hope 1 What is vulgar, but to refuse the claim on 
acute and conclusive reasons ? What is gentle but to 
allow it, and give their heart and yours one holiday 
from the national caution ? Without the rich heart, 
wealth is an ugly beggar. The king of Schiraz could 



412 ESSAY IV, 

not afford to be so bountiful as the poor Osman who 
dwelt at his gate. Osman had a humanity so broad 
and deep, that although his speech was so bold and free 
with the Koran, as to disgust all the dervishes, yet 
was there never a poor outcast, eccentric, or insane 
man^ some fool who had cut off his beard, or who had 
been mutilated under a vow, or had a pet madness in 
his brain, but fled at once to him, — that great heart 
lay there so sunny and hospitable in the centre of the 
country, — that it seemed as if the instinct of all suf- 
ferers drew them to his side. And the madness which 
he harbored, he did not share. Is not this to be rich ? 
this only to be rightly rich ? 

But I shall hear without pain, that I play the cour- 
tier very ill, and talk of that which I do not well un- 
derstand. It is easy to see, that what is called by 
distinction society and fashion, has good laws as well 
as bad, has much that is necessary and much that is 
absurd. Too good for banning, and too bad for bless- 
ing, it reminds us of a tradition of the pagan mythol- 
ogy, in any attempt to settle its character. " I over- 
heard Jove, one day," said Silenus, " talking of de- 
stroying the earth ; he said, it had failed ; they were 
all rogues and vixens, who went from bad to worse, 
as fast as the days succeeded each other. Minerva said, 
she hoped not ; they were only ridiculous little crea- 
tures, with this odd circumstance, that they had a blur, 
or indeterminate aspect, seen far or seen near : if you 
called them bad, they would appear so ; if you called 
them good, they would appear so ; and there was no 
one person or action among them, which would not 
puzzle her owl, much more all Olympus, to know 
whether it was fundamentally bad or good." 



GIFTS 



Gifts of one who loved me,^ 
'T was high time they came ; 
When he ceased to love me, 
Time they stopped for shame. 



ESSAY V. 



GIFTS 




T is said that the world is in a state of 
bankruptcy, that the world owes the world 
more than the world can pay, and ought 
to go into chancery, and be sold. I do 
not think this general insolvency, which involves in 
some sort all the population, to be the reason of the 
difficulty experienced at Christmas and New Year, 
and other times, in bestowing gifts ; since it is always 
so pleasant to be generous, though very vexatious to 
pay debts. But the impediment lies in the choosing. 
If, at any time, it comes into my head, that a present 
is due from me to somebody, I am puzzled what to 
give, until the opportunity is gone. Flowers and 
fruits are always fit presents ; flowers, because they 
are a proud assertion that a ray of beauty outvalues 
all the utilities of the world. These gay natures con- 
trast with the somewhat stern countenance of ordinary 
nature : they are like music heard out of a work- 
house. Nature does not cocker us : we are children, 
not pets : she is not fond : everything is dealt to us 
without fear or favor, after severe universal laws. 
Yet these delicate flowers look like the frolic and in- 



41 6 - i:SSAY F. 

terference of love and beauty. Men use to tell us 
that we love flattery, even though we are not deceived 
by it, because it shows that we are of importance 
enough to be courted. Something like that pleasure, 
the flowers give us : what am I to whom these sweei 
hints are addressed 1 Fruits are acceptable gifts, be- 
cause they are the flower of commodities, and admit 
of fantastic values being attached to them. If a man 
should send to me to come a hundred miles to visit 
him, and should set before me a basket of fine sum- 
mer-fruit, I should think there was some proportion 
between the labor and the reward. 

For common gifts, necessity makes pertinences and 
beauty every day, and one is glad when an imperative 
leaves him no option, since if the man at the door 
have no shoes, you have not to consider whether you 
could procure him a paint-box. And as it is always 
pleasing to see a man eat bread, or drink water, in 
the house or out of doors, so it is always a great sat- 
isfaction to supply these first wants. Necessity does 
everything well. In our condition of universal de- 
pendence, it seems heroic to let the petitioner be the 
judge of his necessity, and to give all that is asked, 
though at great inconvenience. If it be a fantastic 
desire, it is better to leave to others the office of pun- 
ishing him. I can think of many parts I should pre- 
fer playing to that of the Furies. Next to things of 
necessity, the rule for a gift, which one of my friends 
prescribed, is, that we might convey to some person 
that which properly belonged to his character, and 
was easily associated with him in thought. But our 
tokens of compliment and love are for the most part 



GIFTS. 



417 



barbarous. Rings and other jewels are not gifts, but 
apologies for gifts. The only gift is a portion of thy- 
self. Thou must bleed for me. Therefore the poet 
brings his poem ; the shepherd, his lamb ; the farmer, 
corn ; the miner, a gem ; the sailor, coral and shells ; 
the painter, his picture ; the girl, a handkerchief of 
her own sewing. This is right and pleasing, for it 
restores society in so far to the primary basis, when a 
man's biography is conveyed in his gift, and every 
man's wealth is an index of his merit. But it is a 
cold, lifeless business when you go to the shops to 
buy me something, which does not represent your life 
and talent, but a goldsmith's. This is fit for kings, 
and rich men who represent kings, and a false state 
of property, to make presents of gold and silver stuffs, 
as a kind of symbolical sin-offering, or payment of 
blackmail. 

The law of benefits is a difficult channel, which re- 
quires careful sailing, or rude boats. It is not the 
office of a man to receive gifts. How dare you give 
them? We wish to be self-sustained. We do not 
quite forgive a giver. The hand that feeds us is in 
some danger of being bitten. We can receive any- 
thing from love, for that is a way of receiving it from 
ourselves ; but not from any one who assumes to 
bestow. We sometimes hate the meat which we eat, 
because there seems something of degrading depend- 
ence in living by it. 

"Brother, if Jove to thee a present make, 
Take heed that from his hands thou nothing take." 

We ask the whole. Nothing less will content us. 
We arraign society, if it do not give us besides earth, 
27 



4i8 ESSAY V. 

and fire, and water, opportunity, love, reverence, and 
objects of veneration. 

He is a good man, who can receive a gift well. 
We are either glad or sorry at a gift, and both emo- 
tions are unbecoming. Some violence, I think, is 
done, some degradation borne, when I rejoice or 
grieve at a gift. I am sorry when my independence 
is invaded, or when a gift comes from such as do not 
know my spirit, and so the act is not supported ; and 
if the gift pleases me overmuch, then I should be 
ashamed that the donor should read my heart, and 
see that I love his commodity, and not him. The 
gift, to be true, must be the flowing of the giver unto 
me, correspondent to my flowing unto him. When 
the waters are at level, then my goods pass to him, 
and his to me. All his are mine, all mine. his. I 
say to him. How can you give me this pot of oil, or 
this flagon of wine, when all your oil and wine is 
mine, which belief of mine this gift seems to deny ? 
Hence the fitness of beautiful, not useful things for 
gifts. This giving is flat usurpation, and therefore 
when the beneficiary is ungrateful, as all beneficiaries 
hate all Timons, not at all considering the value of the 
gift, but looking back to the greater store it was taken 
from, I rather sympathize with the beneficiary, than 
with the anger of my lord Timon. For, the expecta- 
tion of gratitude is mean, and is continually punished 
by the total insensibility of the obliged person. It is 
a great happiness to get ofl", without injury and heart- 
burning, from one who has had the ill luck to be 
served by you. It is a very onerous business, this of 
being served, and the debtor naturally wisjies tp give 



GIFTS. 419 

you a slap. A golden text for these gentlemen is 
that which I so admire iu the Buddhist, who never 
thanks, and who says, " Do not flatter your benefac- 
tors.'' 

The reason of these discords I conceive to be, that 
there is no commensurability between a man and any 
gift. You cannot give anything to a magnanimous 
person- After you have served him, he at once puts 
you in debt by his magnanimity. The service a man 
renders his friend is trivial and selfish, compared with 
the service he knows his friend stood in readiness to 
yield him, alike before he had begun to serve his 
friend, and now also. Compared with that good-will 
I bear my friend, the benefit it is in my power to ren- 
der him seems small. Besides, our action on each 
other, good as well as evil, is so incidental and at ran- 
dom, that we can seldom hear the acknowledgments 
. of any person who would thank us for a benefit, with- 
out some shame and humiliation. We can rarely 
strike a direct stroke, but must be content with an 
oblique one ; we seldom have the satisfaction of yielding 
a direct benefit, which is directly received. But rec- 
titude scatters favors on every side without knowing 
it, and receives with wonder the thanks of all people. 

I fear to breathe any treason against the majesty of 
love, which is the genius and god of gifts, and to 
whom we must not affect to prescribe. Let him give 
kingdoms or flower-leaves indifferently. There are 
persons, from whom we always expect fairy-tokens ; 
let us not cease to expect them. This is prerogative, 
and not to be limited by our municipal rules. For 
the rest, I like to see that we cannot be bought and 



420 ESSAY V. 

sold. The best of hospitality and of generosity is also 
not in the will, but in fate. I find that I am not 
much to you ; you do not need me ; you do not feel 
me ; then am I thrust out of doors, though you proffer 
me house and lands. No services are of any value, 
but only likeness. When I have attempted to join 
myself to others by services, it proved an intellectual 
trick, — no more. They eat your service like apples, 
and leave you out. But love them, and they feel you, 
and delight in you all the time. 



NATURE. 



The rounded world is fair to see, 

Nine times folded in mystery : 

Though bafled seers cannot impart 

The secret of its laboring heart, 

Throb thine with Nature's throbbing breast, 

And all is clear from east to west. 

Spirit that lurks each form within 

Beckons to spirit of its kin 5 

Self-kindled every atom glows, 

And hints the future which it owes. 



ESSAY VL 



NATURE, 




j^^e^^^lHERE are days which occur in this climate, 
Wm E^- at almost any season of the year, wherein the 
world reaches its perfection, when the air, the 
heavenly bodies, and the earth make a har- 
mony, as if nature would indulge her offspring ; when, 
in these bleak upper sides of the planet, nothing is to de- 
sire that we have heard of the happiest latitudes, and we 
bask in the shining hours of Florida and Cuba ; when 
everything that has life gives sign of satisfaction, and 
the cattle that lie on the ground seem to have great 
and tranquil thoughts. These halcyons may be looked 
for with a little more assurance in that pure October 
weather, which we distinguish by the name of the In- 
dian summer. The day, immeasurably long, sleeps 
over the broad hills and warm wide fields. To have 
lived through all its sunny hours, seems longevity 
enough. The solitary places do not seem quite lonely. 
At the gates of the forest, the surprised man of the 
world is forced to leave his city estimates of great and 
small, wise and foolish. The knapsack of custom falls 
off his back with the first step he makes into these 
precincts. Here is sanctity which shames our relig- 



424 ESSAY VI, 

ions, and reality which discredits our heroes. Here 
we find nature to be the circumstance which dwarfs 
every other circumstance, and judges like a god all 
men that come to her. We have crept out of our 
close and crowded houses into the night and morning, 
and we see what majestic beauties daily wrap us in 
their bosom. How willingly we would escape the bar- 
riers which render them comparatively impotent, es- 
cape the sophistication and second thought, and suffer 
nature to entrance us. The tempered light of the 
woods is like a perpetual morning, and is stimulating 
and heroic. The anciently reported spells of these 
places creep on us. The stems of pines, hemlocks, 
and oaks, almost gleam like iron on the excited eye. 
The incommunicable trees begin to persuade us to 
live with them, and quit our life of solemn trifles. 
Here no history, or church, or state, is interpolated on 
the divine sky and the immortal year. How easily 
we might walk onward into the opening landscape, 
absorbed by new pictures, and by thoughts fast suc- 
ceeding each other, until by degrees the recollection of 
home was crowded out of the mind, all memory oblit- 
erated by the tyranny of the present, and we were led 
in triumph by nature. 

These enchantments are medicinal, they sober and 
heal us. These are plain pleasures, kindly and native 
to us. We come to our own, and make friends with 
matter, which the ambitious chatter of the schools 
would persuade us to despise. We never can part 
with it ; the mind loves its old home : as water to our 
thirst, so is the rock, the ground, to our eyes, and 
hands, and feet. It is firm water : it is cold flame : 



NATURE, 425 

what health, what affinity ! Ever an old friend, ever 
like a dear friend and brother, when we chat affectedly 
with strangers, comes in this honest face, and takes a 
grave liberty with us, and shames us out of our non- 
sense. Cities give not the human senses room enough. 
We go out daily and nightly to feed the eyes on the 
horizon, and require so much scope, just as we need 
water for our bath. There are all degrees of natural 
influence, from these quarantine powers of nature, up 
to her dearest and gravest ministrations to the imag- 
ination and the soul. There is the bucket of cold 
water from the spring, the wood-fire to which the 
chilled traveller rushes for safety, — and there is the 
sublime moral of autumn and of noon. We nestle in 
nature, and draw our living as parasites from her 
roots and grains, and we receive glances from the 
heavenly bodies, which call us to solitude, and fore- 
tell the remotest future. The blue zenith is the point 
in which romance and reality meet. I think, if we 
should be rapt away into all that we dream of heaven, 
and should converse with Gabriel and Uriel, the upper, 
sky would be all that would remain of our furniture. \ 
It seems as if the day was not wholly profane, in 
which we have given heed to some natural object. 
The fall of snow-flakes in a still air, preserving to each 
crystal its perfect form ; the blowing of sleet over a 
wide sheet of water, and over plains ; the waving rye- 
field ; the mimic waving of acres of houstonia, whose 
innumerable florets whiten and ripple before the eye ; 
the reflections of trees and flowers in glassy lakes ; the 
musical steaming odorous south wind, which converts 
all trees to wind-harps ; the crackling and spurting of 



426 ESSAY VL 

hemlock in the flames ; or of pine logs, which yield 
glory to the walls and faces in the sitting-room, — 
these are the music and pictures of the most ancient 
religion. My house stands in low land, with limited 
outlook, and on the skirt of the village. But I go 
with my friend to the shore of our little river, and 
with one stroke of the paddle, I leave the village politics 
and personalities, yes, and the world of villages and 
personalities behind, and pass into a delicate realm of 
sunset and moonlight, too bright almost for spotted 
man to enter without novitiate and probation. We 
penetrate bodily this incredible beauty : we dip our 
hands in this painted element : our eyes are bathed 
in these lights and forms. , A holiday, a villeggiatura, 
a royal revel, the proudest, most heart-rejoicing festival 
that valor and beauty, power and taste, ever decked 
and enjoyed, establishes itself on the instant. These 
sunset clouds, these delicately emerging stars, with their 
private and ineffable glances, signify it and proffer it. 
I am taught the poorness of our invention, the ugliness 
of towns and palaces. Art and luxury have early 
learned that they must work as enhancement and 
sequel to this original beauty. I am overinstructed 
for my return. Henceforth I shall be hard to please. 
I cannot go back to toys. I am grown expensive and 
sophisticated. I can no longer live without elegance : 
but a countryman shall be my master of revels. He 
who knows the most, he who knows what sweets and 
virtues are in the ground, the waters, the plants, the 
heavens, and how to come at these enchantments, is 
the rich and royal man. Only as far as the masters 
of the world have called in nature to their aid, can 



NATURE, 427 

they reach the height of magnificence. This is the 
meaning of their hanging gardens, villas, garden- 
houses, islands, parks, and preserves, to back their 
faulty personality with these strong accessories. I do 
not wonder that the landed interest should be invinci- 
ble in the state with these dangerous auxiliaries. 
These bribe and invite ; not kings, not palaces, not 
men, not women, but these tender and poetic stars 
eloquent of secret promises. We heard what the rich 
man said, we knew of his villa, his grove, his wine, 
and his company, but the provocation and point of 
the invitation came out of these beguiling stars. In 
their soft glances, I see what men strove to realize in 
some Versailles, or Paphos, or Ctesiphon. Indeed, 
it is the magical lights of the horizon, and the blue 
sky for the background, which save all our works of 
art, which were otherwise bawbles. When the rich 
tax the poor with servility and obsequiousness, they 
should consider the effect of men reputed to be the 
possessors of nature, on imaginative minds. Ah ! if 
the rich were rich as the poor fancy riches ! A boy 
hears a military band play on the field at night, and 
he has kings and queens, and famous chivalry palpa- 
bly before him. He hears the echoes of a horn in a 
hill country, in the Notch Mountains, for example, 
which converts the mountains into an -3Eolian harp, 
and this supernatural tiralira restores to him the Do- 
rian mythology, Apollo, Diana, and all divine hunters 
and huntresses. Can a musical note be so lofty, so 
haughtily beautiful ! To the poor young poet, thus fab- 
ulous is his picture of society ; he is loyal ; he respects 
the rich ; they are rich for the sake of his imagina- 



428 ESSAY VL 

tion ; how poor his fancy would be, if they were not 
rich ! That they have some high-fenced grove, which 
they call a park ; that they live in larger and better-gar- 
nished saloons than he has visited, and go in coaches, 
keeping only the society of the elegant, to watering- 
places, and to distant cities, are the groundwork from 
which he has delineated estates of romance, compared 
with which their actual possessions are shanties and 
paddocks. The muse herself betrays her son, and 
enhances the gifts of wealth and well-born beauty, by 
a radiation out of the air, and clouds, and forests that 
skirt the road, — a certain haughty favor, as if from 
patrician genii to patricians, a kind of aristocracy in 
nature, a prince of the power of the air. 

The moral sensibility which makes Edens and Teni- 
pes so easily, may not be always found, but the ma- 
terial landscape is never far off. We can find these 
enchantments without visiting the Co mo Lake, or the 
Madeira Islands. We exaggerate the praises of local 
scenery. In every landscape, the point of astonish- 
ment is the meeting of the sky and the earth, and that 
is seen from the first hillock as well as from the top of 
the Alleghanies. The stars at night stoop down over 
the brownest, homeliest common, with all the spiritual 
magnificence which they shed on the Campagna, or 
on the marble deserts of Egypt. The uprolled clouds 
and the colors of morning and evening, will transfigure 
maples and alders. The difference between landscape 
and landscape is small, but there is great difference 
in the beholders. There is nothing so wonderful in 
any particular landscape, as the necessity of being 
beautiful under which every landscape lies. Nature 



NATURE. 429 

cannot be surprised in undress. Beauty breaks in 
everywhere. 

But it is very easy to outrun the sympathy of readers 
on this topic, which schoolmen called natura riaturata, 
or nature passive. One can hardly speak directly of 
it without excess. It is as easy to broach in mixed 
companies what is called " the subject of religion." 
A susceptible person does not like to indulge his tastes 
in this kind, without the apology of some trivial ne- 
cessity ; he goes to see a wood-lot, or to look at the 
crops, or to fetch a plant or a mineral from a remote 
locality, or he carries a fowling-piece, or a fishing-rod. 
I suppose this shame must have a good reason. A 
dilettantism in nature is barren and unworthy. The 
fop of fields is no better than his brother of Broadway. 
Men are naturally hunters and inquisitive of wood- 
craft, and I suppose that such a gazetteer as wood- 
cutters and Indians should furnish facts for, would 
take place in the most sumptuous drawing-rooms of 
all the " Wreaths " and '' Flora's chaplets " of the 
bookshops ; yet ordinarily, whether we are too clumsy 
for so subtle a topic, or from whatever cause, as soon 
as men begin to write on nature, they fall into euphu- 
ism. Frivolity is a most unfit tribute to Pan, who 
ought to be represented in the mythology as the most 
continent of gods. I would not be frivolous before the 
admirable reserve and prudence of time, yet I cannot 
renounce the right of returning often to this old topic. 
The multitude of false churches accredits the true re- 
ligion. Literature, poetry, science, are the homage of 
man to this unfathomed secret, concerning which no 
sane man can affect an indifference or incuriosity. 



430 je:ssay vl 

Nature is loved by what is best in us. It is loved as 
the city of God, although, or rather because there is no 
citizen. The sunset is unlike anything that is under- 
neath it : it wants men. And the beauty of nature 
must always seem unreal and mocking, until the land- 
scape has human figures, that are as good as itself. If 
there were good men, there would never be this rapture 
in nature. If the king is in the palace, nobody looks 
at the walls. It is when he is gone, and the house is 
filled with grooms and gazers, that we turn from the 
people, to find relief in the majestic men that are sug- 
gested by the pictures and the architecture. The crit- 
ics who complain of the sickly separation of the beauty 
of nature from the thing to be done, must consider 
that our hunting of the picturesque is inseparable from 
our protest against false society. Man is fallen ; na- 
ture is erect, and serves as a differential thermometer, 
detecting the presence or absence of the divine senti- 
ment in man. By fault of our dulness and selfishness, 
we are looking up to nature, but when we are conva- 
lescent, nature will look up to us. We see the foam- 
ing brook with compunction ; if our own life flowed 
with the right energy, we should shame the brook. 
The stream of zeal sparkles with real fire, and not 
with reflex rays of sun and moon. Nature may be as 
selfishly studied as trade. Astronomy to the selfish 
becomes astrology; psychology, mesmerism (with in- 
tent to show where our spoons are gone) ; and anato- 
my and physiology become phrenology and palmistry. 
But taking timely warning, and leaving many things 
unsaid on this topic, let us not longer omit our homage 
to the Efficient Nature, natura naturans, the quick cause, 



NATURE, 431 

before which all forms flee as the driven snows, itself 
secret, its works driven before it in flocks and multi- 
tudes, (as the ancients represented nature by Proteus, 
a shepherd,) and in undescribable variety. It publishes 
itself in creatures, reaching from particles and spicula, 
through transformation on transformation to the high- 
est symmetries, arriving at consummate results with- 
} out a shock or a leap. A little heat, that is, a little 
I motion, is all that differences the bald, dazzling white, 
and deadly cold poles of the earth from the prolific 
tropical climates. All changes pass without violence, 
by reason of the two cardinal conditions of boundless 
space and boundless time. Geology has initiated us 
into the secularity of nature, and taught us to disuse 
our dame-school measures, and exchange our Mosaic 
and Ptolemaic schemes for her large style. We knew 
nothing rightly, for want of perspective. Now we 
learn what patient periods must round themselves be- 
fore the rock is formed, then before the rock is broken, 
and the first lichen race has disintegrated the thinnest 
external plate into soil, and opened the door for the 
remote Flora, Fauna, Ceres, and Pomona, to come in. 
How far off yet is the trilobite ! how far the quadru- 
ped ! how inconceivably remote is man ! All duly ar- 
rive, and then race after race of men. It is a long 
way from granite to the oyster : farther yet to Plato, 
and the preaching of the immortality of the soul. Yet 
all must come, as surely as the first atom has two 
sides. 

Motion or change, and identity or rest, are the first 
and second secrets of nature : Motion and Rest. The 
whole code of her laws may be written on the thumb- 



432 ESSAY VL 

nail, or the signet of a ring. The whirling bubble on 
the surface of a brook admits us to the secret of the 
mechanics of the sky. Every shell on the beach is a 
key to it. A little water made to rotate in a cup ex- 
plains the formation of the simpler shells ; the addi- 
tion of matter from year to year arrives at last at the 
most complex forms ; and yet so poor is nature with 
all her craft, that, from the beginning to the end of 
the universe, she has but one stuff, — but one stuff 
with its two ends, to serve up all her dream-like vari- 
ety. Compound it how she will, star, sand, fire, 
water, tree, man, it is still one stuff, and betrays the 
same properties. 

Nature is always consistent, though she feigns to 
contravene her own laws. She keeps her laws, and 
seems to transcend them. She arms and equips an 
animal to find its place and living in the earth, and, 
at the same time, she arms and equips another animal 
to destroy it. Space exists to divide creatures ; but 
by clothing the sides of a bird with a few feathers, she 
gives him a petty omnipresence. The direction is 
forever onward, but the artist still goes back for ma- 
terials, and begins again with the first elements on the 
most advanced stage : otherwise, all goes to ruin. If 
we look at her work, we seem to catch a glance of a 
system in transition. Plants are the young of the 
world, vessels of health and vigor ; but they grope 
ever upward towards consciousness : the trees are im- 
perfect men, and seem to bemoan their imprisonment, 
rooted in the ground. The animal is the novice and 
probationer of a more advanced order. The men, 
though young, having tasted the first drop from the 



NATURE. 433 

cup of thought, are already dissipated : the maples 
and ferns are still uncorrupt ; yet no doubt, when they 
come to consciousness, they too will curse and swear. 
Flowers so strictly belong to youth, that we adult 
men soon come to feel, that their beautiful generations 
concern not us : we have had our day ; now let the 
children have theirs. The flowers jilt us, and we are 
old bachelors with our ridiculous tenderness. 

Things are so strictly related, that according to the 
skill of the eye, from any one object the parts and 
properties of any other may be predicted. If we had 
eyes to see it, a bit of stone from the city wall would 
certify us of the necessit}^ that man must exist, as 
readily as the city. That identity makes us all one, 
and reduces to nothing great intervals on our custom- 
ary scale. We talk of deviations from natural life, as 
if artificial life were not also natural. The smoothest 
curled courtier in the boudoirs of a palace has an ani- 
mal nature, rude and aboriginal as a white bear, om- 
nipotent to its own ends, and is directly related, there 
amid essences and billetsdoux, to Himmaleh moun- 
tain-chains, and the axis of the globe. If we consider 
how much we are nature's, we need not be superstitious 
about towns, as if that terrific or benefic force did not 
find us there also, and fashion cities. Nature, who 
made the mason, made the house. We may easily 
hear too much of rural influences. The cool disen- 
gaged air of natural objects, makes them enviable to 
us, chafed and irritable creatures with red faces, and 
we think we shall be as grand as they, if we camp out 
and eat roots ; but let us be men instead of wood- 
chucks, and the oak and the elm shall gladly serve 
28 



434 ESSAY VL 

us, though we sit in chairs of ivory on carpets of 
silk. 

This guiding identity runs through all the surprises 
and contrasts of the piece, and characterizes every law. 
Man carries the world in his head, the whole astron- 
omy and chemistry suspended in a thought. Because 
the history of nature is charactered in his brain, there- 
fore is he the prophet and discoverer of her secrets. 
Every known fact in natural science was divined by 
the presentiment of somebody, before it was actually 
verified. A man does not tie his shoe without recog- 
nizing laws which bind the farthest regions of nature : 
moon, plant, gas, crystal, are concrete geometry and 
numbers. Common sense knows its own, and recog- 
nizes the fact at first sight in chemical experiment. 
The common sense of Franklin, Dalton, Davy, and 
Black, is the same common sense which made the 
arrangements which now it discovers. 

If the identity expresses organized rest, the counter 
action runs also into organization. The astronomers 
said, " Give us matter, and a little motion, and we 
will construct the universe. It is not enough that we 
should have matter, we must also have a single im- 
pulse, one shove to launch the mass, and generate the 
harmony of the centrifugal and centripetal forces. 
Once heave the ball from the hand, and we can show 
how all this mighty order grew." — "A very unrea- 
sonable postulate," said the metaphysicians, " and a 
plain begging of the question. Could you not prevail 
to know the genesis of projection, as well as the con- 
tinuation of if? " Nature, meanwhile, had not waited 
for the discussion, but, right or wrong, bestowed the 



NATURE, 435 

impulse, and the balls rolled. It was no great affair, 
a mere push, but the astronomers were right in mak- 
ing much of it, for there is no end to the consequences 
of the act. That famous aboriginal push propagates 
itself through all the balls of the system, and through 
every atom of every ball, through all the races of 
creatures, and through the history and performances 
of every individual. Exaggeration is in the course of 
things. Nature sends no creature, no man into the 
world, without adding a small excess of his proper 
quality. Given the planet, it is still necessary to add 
the impulse ; so, to every creature nature added a lit- 
tle violence of direction in its proper path, a shove to 
put it on its way ; in every instance, a slight generos- 
ity, a drop too much. Without electricity the air 
would rot, and without this violence of direction, 
which men and women have, without a spice of bigot 
and fanatic, no excitement, no efficiency. We aim 
above the mark, to hit the mark. Every act hath 
some falsehood of exaggeration in it. And when 
now and then comes along some sad, sharp-eyed man, 
who sees how paltry a game is played, and refuses to 
play, but blabs the secret ; — how then ? is the bird 
flown ? O no, the wary Nature sends a new troop of 
fairer forms, of lordlier youths, with a little more ex- 
cess of direction to hold them fast to their several 
aim ; makes them a little wrong-headed in that direc- 
tion in which they are rightest, and on goes the game 
again with new whirl, for a generation or two more. 
The child with his sweet pranks, the fool of his senses, 
commanded by every sight and sound, without any 
power to compare and rank his sensations, abandoned 



436 \ ESSAY VL 

to a whistle or a painted chip, to a lead dragoon, or 
a gingerbread-dog, individualizing everything, gener- 
alizing nothing, delighted with every new thing, lies 
down at night overpowered by the fatigue, which this 
day of continual pretty madness has incurred. But 
Nature has answered her purpose with the curly, 
dimpled lunatic. She has tasked every faculty, and 
has secured the symmetrical growth of the bodily 
frame, by all these attitudes and exertions, — an end 
of the first importance, which could not be trusted to 
any care less perfect than her own. This glitter, this 
opaline lustre plays round the top of every toy to his 
eye, to insure his fidelity, and he is deceived to his 
good. We are made alive and kept alive by the same 
arts. Let the stoics say what they please, we do not 
eat for the good of living, but because the meat is sa- 
vory and the appetite is keen. The vegetable life 
docs not content itself with casting from the flower or 
the tree a single seed, but it fills the air and earth 
with a prodigality of seeds, that, if thousands perish, 
thousands may plant themselves, that hundreds may 
come up, that tens may live to maturity, that, at least, 
one may replace the parent. All things betray the 
same calculated profusion. The excess of fear with 
which the animal frame is hedged round, shrinking 
from cold, starting at sight of a snake, or at a sudden 
noise, protects us, through a multitude of groundless 
alarms, from some one real danger at last. The lover 
seeks in marriage his private felicity and perfection, 
with no prospective end ; and nature hides in his hap- 
piness her own end; namely, progeny, or the per- 
petuity of the race. 



NATURE. 437 

But the craft with which the world is made, runs 
also into the mind and character of men. No man is 
quite sane; each has a vein of folly in his compo- 
sition, a slight determination of blood to the head, to 
make sure of holding him hard to some one point 
which nature had taken to heart. Great causes are 
never tried on their merits ; but the cause is reduced 
to particulars to suit the size of the partisans, and the 
contention is ever hottest on minor matters. Not less 
remarkable is the overfaith of each man in the impor- 
tance of what he has to do or say. The poet, the 
prophet, has a higher value for what he utters than 
any hearer, and therefore it gets spoken. The strong, 
self-complacent Luther declares with an emphasis, not 
to be mistaken, that '' God himself cannot do without 
wise men." Jacob Behmen and George Fox betray 
their egotism in the pertinacity of their controversial 
tracts, and James Nay lor once suffered himself to be 
worshipped as the Christ. Each prophet comes pres- 
ently to identify himself with his thought, and to 
esteem his hat and shoes sacred. However this may 
discredit such persons with the judicious, it helps them 
with the people, as it gives heat, pungency, and pub- 
licity to their words. A similar experience is not 
infrequent in private life. Each young and ardent 
person writes a diary, in which, when the hours of 
prayer and penitence arrive, he inscribes his soul. 
The pages thus written are, to him, burning and fra- 
grant : he reads them on his knees by midnight and 
by the morning star ; he wets them with his tears ; 
they are sacred ; too good for the world, and hardly 
yet to be shown to the dearest friend. This is the 



438 ESSAY VI. 

man-child that is born to the soul, and her life still 
circulates in the babe. The umbilical cord has not 
yet been cut. After some time has elapsed, he begins 
to wish to admit his friend to this hallowed experience, 
and with hesitation, yet with firmness, exposes the 
pages to his eye. Will they not burn his eyes ? The 
friend coldly turns them over, and passes from the 
writing to conversation, with easy transition, which 
strikes the other party with astonishment and vexa- 
tion. He cannot suspect the writing itself. Days 
and nights of fervid life, of communion with angels of 
darkness and of light, have engraved their shadowy 
characters on that tear-stained book. He suspects the 
intelligence or the heart of his friend. Is there then 
no friend 1 He cannot yet credit that one may have 
impressive experience, and yet may not know how to 
put his private fact into literature ; and perhaps the 
discovery that wisdom has other tongues and ministers 
than we, that though we should hold our peace, the 
truth would not the less be spoken, might check in- 
juriously the flames of our zeal. A man can only 
speak, so long as he does not feel his speech to be 
partial and inadequate. It is partial, but he does not 
see it to be so, whilst he utters it. As soon as he is 
released from the instinctive and particular, and sees 
its partiality, he shuts his mouth in disgust. For, no 
man can write anything, who does not think that what 
he writes is for the time the history of the world ; or 
do anything well, who does not esteem his work to be 
of importance. My work may be of none, but I must 
not think it of none, or I shall not do it with impu- 
nity. 



NATURE, 439 

In like manner, there is throughout nature some- 
thing mocking, something that leads us on and on, 
but arrives nowhere, keeps no faith with us. All 
promise outruns the performance. We live in a sys- 
tem of approximations. Every end is prospective of 
some other end, which is also temporary ; a round 
and final success nowhere. We are encamped in na- 
ture, not domesticated. Hunger and thirst lead us on 
to eat and to drink; but bread and wine, mix and 
cook them how you will, leave us hungry and thirsty, 
after the stomach is full. It is the same with all our 
arts and performances. Our music, our poetry, our 
language itself are not satisfactions, but suggestions. 
The hunger for wealth, which reduces the planet to a 
garden, fools the eager pursuer. What is the end 
sought ? Plainly to secure the ends of good sense and 
beauty, from the intrusion of deformity or vulgarity of 
any kind. But what an operose method ! What a 
train of means to secure a little conversation ! This 
palace of brick and stone, these servants, this kitchen, 
these stables, horses and equipage, this bank-stock, and 
file of mortgages ; trade to all the world, country-house 
and cottage by the waterside, all for a little conversa- 
tion, high, clear, and spiritual ! Could it not be had 
as well by beggars on the highway ? No, all these 
things came from successive efforts of these beggars to 
remove friction from the wheels of life, and give op- 
portunity. Conversation, character, were the avowed 
ends ; wealth was good as it appeased the animal cra^^- 
ings, cured the smoky chimney, silenced the creaking 
door, brought friends together in a warm and quiet 
room, and kept the children and the dinner-table in a 



44-0 ESSAY VI. 

different apartment. Thought, virtue, beauty, were 
the ends ; but it was known that men of thought and 
virtue sometimes had the headache, or wet feet, or 
could lose good time whilst the room was getting 
warm in winter days. Unluckily, in the exertions 
necessary to remove these inconveniences, the main 
attention has been diverted to this object ; the old aims 
have been lost sight of, and to remove friction has 
come to be the end. That is the ridicule of rich men, 
and Boston, London, Vienna, and now the govern- 
ments generally of the world, are cities and govern- 
ments of the rich, and the masses are not men, but 
poor men, that is, men who would be rich ; this is the 
ridicule of the class, that they arrive with pains and 
sweat and fury nowhere ; when all is done, it is for 
nothing. They are like one who has interrupted the 
conversation of a company to make his speech, and 
now has forgotten what he went to say. The appear- 
ance strikes the eye everywhere of an aimless society, 
of aimless nations. Were the ends of nature so great 
and cogent, as to exact this immense sacrifice of men ? 
Quite analogous to the deceits in life, there is, as 
might be expected, a similar effect on the eye from 
the face of external nature. There is in woods and 
waters a certain enticement and flattery, together with 
a failure to yield a present satisfaction. This disap- 
pointment is felt in every landscape. I have seen the 
softness and beauty of the summer-clouds floating 
feathery overhead, enjoying, as it seemed, their height 
and privilege of motion, whilst yet they appeared not 
so much the drapery of this place and hour, as fore- 
looking to some pavilions and gardens of festivity be- 



NATURE. 441 

yond. It is an odd jealousy : but the poet finds him- 
self not near enough to his object. The pine-tree, the 
river, the bank of flowers before him, does not seem to 
be nature. Nature is still elsewhere. This or this is 
but outskirt and far-oif reflection and echo of the tri- 
umph that has passed by, and is now at its glancing 
splendor and heyday, perchance in the neighboring 
fields, or, if you stand in the field, then in the adjacent 
woods. The present object shall give you this sense 
of stillness that follows a pageant which has just gone 
by. What splendid distance, what recesses of ineffk- 
ble pomp and loveliness in the sunset ! But who can 
go where they are, or lay his hand or plant his foot 
thereon ? Off" they fall from the round world for ever 
and ever. It is the same among the men and women, 
as among the silent trees ; always a referred existence, 
an absence, never a presence and satisfaction. Is it, 
that beauty can never be grasped ? in persons and in 
landscape, is equally inaccessible ■? The accepted and 
betrothed lover has lost the wildest charm of his 
maiden in her acceptance of him. She was heaven 
whilst he pursued her as a star : she cannot be heaven, 
if she stoops to such a one as he. 

What shall we say of this omnipresent appearance 
of that first projectile impulse, of this flattery and 
balking of so many well-meaning creatures '? Must 
we not suppose somewhere in the universe a slight 
treachery and derision 1 Are we not engaged to a 
serious resentment of this use that is made of us? 
Are we tickled trout, and fools of nature '? One look 
at the face of heaven and earth lays all petulance at 
rest, and soothes us to wiser convictions. To the in- 



442 ESSAY VL 

telligent, nature converts itself into a vast promise, and 
will not be rashly explained. Her secret is untold. 
Many and many an QEdipus arrives : he has the whole 
mystery teeming in his brain. Alas ! the same sorcery 
has spoiled his skill ; no syllable can he shape on his 
lips. Her mighty orbit vaults like the fresh rainbow 
into the deep, but no archangers wing was yet strong 
enough to follow it, and report of the return of the 
curve. But it also appears, that our actions are sec- 
onded and disposed to greater conclusions than we 
designed. We are escorted on every hand through 
life by spiritual agents, and a beneficent purpose lies 
in wait for us. We cannot bandy words with nature, 
or deal with her as we deal with persons. If we 
measure our individual forces against hers, we may 
easily feel as if we were the sport of an insuperable 
destiny. But if, instead of identifying ourselves with 
the work, we feel that the soul of the workman streams 
through us, we shall find the peace of the morning 
dwelling first in our hearts, and the fathomless powers 
of gravity and chemistry, and, over them, of life, pre- 
existing within us in their highest form. 

The uneasiness which the thought of our helpless- 
ness in the chain' of causes occasions us, results from 
looking too much at one condition of nature, namely, 
Motion. But the drag is never taken from the wheel. 
Wherever the impulse exceeds, the Eest or Identity 
insinuates its compensation. All over the wide fields 
of earth grows the prunella or self-heal. After every 
foolish day we sleep off the fumes and furies of its 
hours ; and though we are always engaged with par- 
ticulars, and often enslaved to them, we bring with us 



NATURE, 



443 



to every experiment the innate universal laws. These, 
while they exist in the mind as ideas, stand around us 
in nature forever embodied, a present sanity to expose 
and cure the insanity of men. Our servitude to par- 
ticulars betrays us into a hundred foolish expectations. 
We anticipate a new era from the invention of a loco- 
motive, or a balloon ; the new engine brings with it 
the old checks. They say that by electro-magnetism, 
your salad shall be grown from the seed, whilst your 
fowl is roasting for dinner : it is a symbol of our mod- 
ern aims and endeavors, — of our condensation and 
acceleration of objects : but nothing is gained ; nature 
cannot be cheated ; man's life is but seventy salads 
long, grow they swift or grow they slow. In these 
checks and impossibilities, however, we find our advan- 
tage, not less than in the impulses. Let the victory 
fall where it will, we are on that side. And the 
knowledge that we traverse the whole scale of being, 
from the centre to the poles of nature, and have some 
stake in every possibility, lends that sublime lustre to 
death, which philosophy and religion have too out- 
wardly and literally striven to express in the popular 
doctrine of the immortality of the soul. The reality 
is more excellent than the report. Here is no ruin, 
no discontinuity, no spent ball. The divine circula- 
tions never rest nor linger. Nature is the incarnation 
of a thought, and turns to a thought again, as ice be- 
comes water and gas. The world is mind precipitated, 
and the volatile essence is forever escaping again into 
the state of free thought. Hence the virtue and pun- 
gency of the influence on the mind, of natural objects, 
whether inorganic or organized. Man imprisoned, 



444 ESSAY VI. 

man crystallized, man vegetative, speaks to man im- 
personated. That power which does not respect quan- 
tity, which makes the whole and the particle its equal 
channel, delegates its smile to the morning, and distils 
its essence into every drop of rain. Every moment 
instructs, and every object : for wisdom is infused into 
every form. It has been poured into us as blood ; 
it convulsed us as pain ; it slid into us as pleasure ; 
it enveloped us in dull, melancholy days, or in days 
of cheerful labor ; we did not guess its essence, until 
after a long time. 



POLITICS. 



Gold and iron are good 

To buy iron and gold ; 

All earth's fleece and food 

For their like are sold. 

Boded Merlin wise, 

Proved Napoleon great, — 

Nor kind nor coinage buys 

Aught above its rate. 

Fear, Craft, and Avarice 

Cannot rear a State. 

Out of dust to build 

What is more than dust, — 

Walls Amphion piled 

Phoebus stablish must. 

When the Muses nine 

With the Virtues meet, 

Find to their design 

An Atlantic seat, 

By green orchard boughs 

Fended from the heat, 

Where the statesman ploughs 

Furrow for the wheat 5 

When the Church is social worth. 

When the state-house is the hearth, 

Then the perfect State is come, 

The republican at home. 



ESSAY vn. 



POLITICS. 




[]N dealing with the State, we ought to re- 
member that its institutions are not aborig- 
inal, though they existed before we were 
born : that they are not superior to the 
citizen . that every one of them was once the act of a 
single man : every law and usage was a man^s expe- 
dient to meet a particular case : that they all are 
imitable, all alterable ; we may make as good ; we 
may make better. Society is an illusion to the young 
citizen. It lies before him in rigid repose, with certain 
names, men, and institutions, rooted like oak-trees to 
the centre, round which aH arrange themselves the 
best they can. But the old statesman knows that 
society is fluid ; there are no such roots and centres ; 
but any particle may suddenly become the centre of 
the movement, and compel the system to gyrate round 
it, as every man of strong will, like Pisistratus, or 
Cromwell, does for a time, and every man of truth, 
like Plato, or Paul, does forever. But politics rest 
on necessary foundations, and cannot be treated with 
levity. Republics abound in young civilians, who be- 
lieve that the laws make the city, that grave modifica- 



448 ESSAY VI I. 

tions of the policy and modes of living, and employ- 
ments of the population, that commerce, education, 
and religion, may be voted in or out ; and that any 
measure, though it were absurd, may be imposed on 
a people, if only you can get sufficient voices to make 
it a law. But the wise know that foolish legislation 
is a rope of sand, which perishes in the twisting ; that 
the State must follow, and not lead the character 
and progress of the citizen ; the strongest usurper is 
quickly got rid of ; and they only who build on Ideas, 
build for eternity ; and that the form of government 
which prevails, is the expression of what cultivation 
exists in the population which permits it. The law 
is only a memorandum. We are superstitious, and 
esteem the statute somewhat : so much life as it has 
in the character of living men, is its force. The 
statute stands there to say, yesterday we agreed so 
and so, but how feel ye this article to-day ? Our 
statute is a currency, which we stamp with our own 
portrait : it soon becomes unrecognizable, and in pro- 
cess of time will return to the mint. Nature is not 
democratic, nor limited-monarchical, but despotic, and 
will not be fooled or abated of any jot of her author- 
ity, by the pertest of her sons : and as fast as the 
public mind is opened to more intelligence, the code is 
seen to be brute and stammering. It speaks not ar- 
ticulately, and must be made to. Meantime the edu- 
cation of the general mind never stops. The reveries 
of the true and simple are prophetic. What the 
tender poetic youth dreams, and prays, and paints 
to-day, but shuns the ridicule of saying aloud, shall 
presently be the resolutions of public bodies, then 



POLITICS, 449 

shall be carried as grievance and bill of rights through 
conflict and war, and then shall be triumphant law 
and establishment for a hundred years, until it gives 
place, in turn, to new prayers and pictures. The his- 
tory of the State sketches in coarse outline the progress 
of thought, and follows at a distance the delicacy of 
culture and of aspiration. 

The theory of politics, which has possessed the mind 
of men, and which they have expressed the best they 
could in their laws and in their revolutions, considers 
persons and property as the two objects for whose pro- 
tection government exists. Of persons, all have equal 
rights, in virtue of being identical in nature. This 
interest, of course, with its whole power demands a 
democracy. Whilst the rights of all as persons are 
equal, in virtue of their access to reason, their rights 
in property are very unequal. One man owns his 
clothes, and another owns a county. This accident, 
depending primarily on the skill and virtue of the 
parties, of which there is every degree, and, seconda- 
rily, on patrimony, falls unequally, and its rights, of 
course, are unequal. Personal rights, universally the 
same, demand a government framed on the ratio of the 
census : property demands a government framed on 
the ratio of owners and of owning. Laban, who has 
flocks and herds, wishes them looked after by an of- 
flcer on the frontiers, lest the Midianites shall drive 
them off*, and pays a tax to that end. Jacob has no 
flocks or herds, and no fear of the Midianites, and 
pays no tax to the officer. It seemed fit that Laban 
and Jacob should have equal rights to elect the officer, 
who is to defend their persons, but that Laban, and 
29 



450 ESSAY VIL 

not Jacob, should elect the officer who is to guard the 
sheep and cattle. And, if question arise whether ad- 
ditional officers or watch-towers should be provided, 
must not Laban and Isaac, and those who must sell 
part of their herds to buy protection for the rest, judge 
better of this, and with more right, than Jacob, who, 
because he is a youth and a traveller, eats their bread 
and not his own ? 

In the earliest society the proprietors made their 
own wealth, and so long as it comes to the owners in 
the direct way, no other opinion would arise in any 
equitable community, than that property should make 
the law for property, and persons the law for persons. 

But property passes through donation or inheritance 
to those who do not create it. Gift, in one case, makes 
it as really the new owner's, as labor made it the first 
owner's : in the other case, of patrimony, the law 
makes an ownership, which will be valid in each 
man's view according to the estimate which he sets on 
the public tranquillity. 

It was not, however, found easy to embody the 
readily admitted principle, that property should make 
law for property, and persons for persons : since per- 
sons and property mixed themselves in every trans- 
action. At last it seemed settled, that the rightful 
distinction was, that the proprietors should have more 
elective franchise than non-proprietors, on the Spartan 
principle of "calling that which is just, equal; not 
that which is equal, just." 

That principle no longer looks so self-evident as it 
appeared in former times, partly, because doubts have 
arisen whether too much weight had not been allowed 



POLITICS. 451 

in the laws, to property, and such a structure given to 
our usages, as allowed the rich to encroach on the 
poor, and to keep them poor; but mainly, because 
there is an instinctive sense, however obscure and yet 
inarticulate, that the whole constitution of property, 
on its present tenures, is injurious, and its influence on 
persons deteriorating and degrading; that truly, the 
only interest for the consideration of the State, is per- 
sons : that property will always follow persons ; that 
the highest end of government is the culture of men : 
and if men can be educated, the institutions will share 
their improvement, and the moral sentiment will write 
the law of the land. 

If it be not easy to settle the equity of this question, 
the peril is less when we take note of our natural de- 
fences. We are kept by better guards than the vigi- 
lance of such magistrates as we commonly elect. So- 
ciety always consists, in greatest part, of young and 
foolish persons. The old, who have seen through the 
hypocrisy of courts and statesmen, die, and leave no 
wisdom to their sons. They believe their own news- 
paper, as their fathers did at their age. With such an 
ignorant and deceivable majority. States would soon 
run to ruin, but that there are limitations, beyond 
which the folly and ambition of governors cannot go. 
Things have their laws, as well as men ; and things 
refuse to be trifled with. Property will be protected. 
Corn will not grow, unless it is planted and manured ; 
but the farmer will not plant or hoe it, unless the 
chances are a hundred to one, that he will cut and 
harvest it. Under any forms, persons and property 
must and will have their just sway. They exert their 



452 ESSAY VIL 

power, as steadily as matter its attraction. Cover up 
a pound of earth never so cunningly, divide and sub- 
divide it ; melt it to liquid, convert it to gas ; it will 
always weigh a pound : it will always attract and re- 
sist other matter, by the full virtue of one pound 
weight; — and the attributes of a person, his wit and 
his moral energy, will exercise, under any law or ex- 
tinguishing tyranny, their proper force, — if not overt- 
ly, then covertly ; if not for the law, then against it ; 
if not wholesomely, then poisonously ; with right, or 
by might. 

The boundaries of personal influence it is impossi- 
ble to fix, as persons are organs of moral or supernat- 
ural force. Under the dominion of an idea, which 
possesses the minds of multitudes, as civil freedom, or 
the religious sentiment, the powers of persons are no 
longer subjects of calculation. A nation of men unani- 
mously bent on freedom, or conquest, can easily con- 
found the arithmetic of statists, and achieve extrava- 
gant actions, out of all proportion to their means ; as 
the Greeks, the Saracens, the Swiss, the Americans, 
and the French have done. 

In like manner, to every particle of property belongs 
its own attraction. A cent is the representative of a 
certain quantity of corn or other commodity. Its value 
is in the necessities of the animal man. It is so much 
warmth, so much bread, so much water, so much land. 
The law may do what it will with the owner of prop- 
erty, its just power will still attach to the cent. The 
law may in a mad freak say, that all shall have power 
except the owners of property : they shall have no 
vote. Nevertheless, by a higher law, the property 



POLITICS. 453 

will, year after year, write every statute that respects 
property. The non-proprietor will be the scribe of 
the proprietor. What the owners wish to do, the 
whole power of property will do, either through the 
law, or else in defiance of it. Of course, I speak of 
all the property, not merely of the great estates. When 
the rich are outvoted, as frequently happens, it is the 
joint treasury of the poor which exceeds their accumu- 
lations. Every man owns something, if it is only a 
cow, or a wheelbarrow, or his arms, and so has that 
property to dispose of. 

The same necessity which secures the rights of per- 
son and property against the malignity or folly of the 
magistrate, determines the form and methods of gov- 
erning, which are proper to each nation, and to its 
habit of thought, and nowise transferable to other 
states of society. In this country, we are very vain 
of our political institutions, which are singular in this, 
that they sprung, within the memory of living men, 
from the character and condition of the people, which 
they still express with sufficient fidelity, — and we os- 
tentatiously prefer them to any other in history. They 
are not better, but only fitter for us. We may be wise 
in asserting the advantage in modern times of the 
democratic form, but to other states of society, in which 
religion consecrated the monarchical, that and not this 
was expedient. Democracy is better for us, because 
the religious sentiment of the present time accords 
better with it. Born democrats, we are nowise quali- 
fied to judge of monarchy, which, to our fathers living 
in the monarchical idea, was also relatively right. 
But our institutions^ though in coincidence with the 



454 i:SSAY VII. 

spirit of the age, have not any exemption from the 
practical defects which have discredited other forms. 
Every actual State is corrupt. Good men must not 
obey the laws too well. What satire on government 
can equal the severity of censure conveyed in the 
word poUtiCy which now for ages has signified cunning, 
intimating that the State is a trick 1 

The same benign necessity and the same practical 
abuse appear in the parties into which each State di- 
vides itself, of opponents and defenders of the admin- 
istration of the government. Parties are also founded 
on instincts, and have better guides to their own hum- 
ble aims than the sagacity of their leaders. They 
have nothing perverse in their origin, but rudely mark 
some real and lasting relation. We might as wisely 
reprove the east wind, or the frost, as a political party, 
whose members, for the most part, could give no ac- 
count of their position, but stand for the defence of 
those interests in which they find themselves. Our 
quarrel with them begins, when they quit this deep 
natural ground at the bidding of some leader, and, 
obeying personal considerations, throw themselves 
into the maintenance and defence of points, nowise 
belonging to their system. A party is perpetually 
corrupted by personality. Whilst we absolve the asso- 
ciation from dishonesty, we cannot extend the same 
charity to their leaders. They reap the rewards of the 
docility and zeal of the masses which they direct. 
Ordinarily, our parties are parties of circumstance, 
and not of principle ; as, the planting interest in con- 
flict with the commercial ; the party of capitalists, and 
that of operatives ; parties which are identical in their 



POLITICS, 455 

moral character, and which can easily change ground 
with each other, in the support of many of their meas- 
ures. Parties of principle, as, religious sects, or the 
party of free-trade, of universal suffrage, of abolition of 
slavery, of abolition of capital punishment, degenerate 
into personalities, or would inspire enthusiasm. The 
vice of our leading parties in this country (which may 
be cited as a fair specimen of these societies of opinion) 
is, that they do not plant themselves on the deep and 
necessary grounds to which they are respectively en- 
titled, but lash themselves to fury in the carrying of 
some local and momentary measure, nowise useful to 
the commonwealth. Of the two great parties, which, 
at this hour, almost share the nation between the^m, I 
should say, that, one has the best cause, and the other 
contains the best men. The philosopher, the poet, or 
the religious man, will, of course, wish to cast his vote 
with the democrat, for free- trade, for wide suffrage, for 
the abolition of legal cruelties in the penal code, and 
for facilitating in every manner the access of the 
young and the poor to the sources of wealth and pow- 
er. But he can rarely accept the persons whom the 
so-called popular party propose to him as representa- 
tives of these liberalities. They have not at heart the 
ends which give to the name of democracy what hope 
and virtue are in it. The spirit of our American rad- 
icalism is destructive and aimless : it is not loving ; it 
has no ulterior and divine ends ; but is destructive 
only out of hatred and selfishness. On the other side, 
the conservative party, composed of the most moder- 
ate, able, and cultivated part of the population, is timid, 
and merely defensive of property. It vindicates no 



456 ESSAY VI I. 

right, it aspires to no real good, it brands no crime, it 
proposes no generous policy, it does not build, nor 
write, nor cherish the arts, nor foster religion, nor es- 
tablish schools, nor encourage science, nor emancipate 
the slave, nor befriend the poor, or the Indian, or the 
immigrant. From neither party, when in power, has 
the world any benefit to expect in science, art, or hu- 
manity, at all commensurate with the resources of the 
nation. 

I do not for these defects despair of our republic. 
We are not at the mercy of any waves of chance. In 
the strife of ferocious parties, human nature always 
finds itself cherished, as the children of the convicts at 
Botany Bay are found to have as healthy a moral sen- 
timent as other children. Citizens of feudal states are 
alarmed at our democratic institutions lapsing into 
anarchy : and the older and more cautious among our- 
selves are learning from Europeans to look with some 
terror at our turbulent freedom. It is said that in our 
license of construing the Constitution, and in the des- 
potism of public opinion, we have no anchor ; and one 
foreign observer thinks he has found the safeguard in 
the sanctity of Marriage among us ; and another thinks 
he has found it in our Calvinism. Fisher Ames ex- 
pressed the popular security more wisely, when he 
compared a monarchy and a republic, saying, " that a 
monarchy is a merchantman, which sails well, but 
will sometimes strike on a rock, and go to the bottom ; 
whilst a republic is a raft, which would never sink, but 
then your feet are always in water." No forms can 
have any dangerous importance, whilst we are be- 
friended by the laws of things. It makes no difference 



POLITICS, 457 

how many tons' weight of atmosphere presses on our 
heads, so long as the same pressure resists it within 
the lungs. Augment the mass a thousand fold, it 
cannot begin to crush us, as long as reaction is equal 
to action. The fact of two poles, of two forces, cen- 
tripetal, and centrifugal, is universal, and each force by 
its own activity develops the other. Wild liberty de- 
velops iron conscience* Want of liberty, by strength- 
ening law and decorum, stupefies conscience. " Lynch- 
law " prevails only where there is greater hardihood 
and self-subsistency in the leaders. A mob cannot 
be a permanency; everybody's interest requires that 
it should not exist, and only justice satisfies all. 

We must trust infinitely to the beneficent necessity 
which shines through all laws. Human nature ex- 
presses itself in them as characteristically as in statues, 
or songs, or railroads, and an abstract of the codes of 
nations would be a transcript of the common con- 
science. Governments have their origin in the moral 
identity of men. Eeason for one is seen to be reason 
for another, and for every other. There is a middle 
measure which satisfies all parties, be they never so 
many, or so resolute for their own. Every man finds 
a sanction for his simplest claims and deeds in decis- 
ions of his own mind, which he calls Truth and Holi- 
ness. In these decisions all the citizens find a perfect 
agreement, and only in these ; not in what is good to 
eat, good to wear, good use of time, or what amount 
of land, or of public aid, each is entitled to claim. 
This truth and justice men presently endeavor to make 
application of, to the measuring of land, the apportion- 
ment of service, the protection of life and property. 



45 8 ESSAY VI L 

Their first endeavors, no doubt, are very awkward. 
Yet absolute right is the first governor ; or, every gov- 
ernment is an impure theocracy. The idea after 
which each community is aiming to make and mend 
its law, is, the will of the wise man. The wise man, 
it cannot find in nature, and it makes awkward but 
earnest efforts to secure his government by contriv- 
ance ; as, by causing the entire people to give their 
voices on every measure ; or, by a double choice to 
get the representation of the whole ; or, by a selection 
of the best citizens ; or, to secure the advantages of 
efficiency and internal peace, by confiding the gov- 
ernment to one, who may himself select his agents. 
All forms of government symbolize an immortal gov- 
ernment, common to all dynasties and independent of 
numbers, perfect where two men exist, perfect where 
there is only one man. 

Every man's nature is a sufficient advertisement to 
him of the character of his fellows. My right and my 
wrong, is their right and their wrong. Whilst I do 
what is fit for me, and abstain from what is unfit, 
my neighbor and I shall often agree in our means, 
and work together for a time to one end. But when- 
ever I find my dominion over myself not sufficient 
for me, and undertake the direction of him also, I 
overstep the truth, and come into false relations to 
him. I may have so much more skill Or strength 
than he, that he cannot express adequately his sense 
of wrong, but it is a lie, and hurts like a lie both 
him and me. Love and nature cannot maintain the 
assumption : it must be executed by a practical lie, 
namely, by force. This undertaking for another, is 



POLITICS. 459 

the blunder which stands in colossal ugliness in the 
governments of the world. It is the same thing in 
numbers, as in a pair, only not quite so intelligible. 
I can see well enough a great difference between my 
setting myself down to a self-control, and my going to 
make somebody else act after my views : but when a 
quarter of the human race assume to tell me what I 
must do, I may be too much disturbed by the circum- 
stances to see so clearly the absurdity of their com- 
mand. Therefore, all public ends look vague and 
quixotic beside private ones. For, any laws but those 
which men make for themselves, are laughable. If I 
put myself in the place of my child, and we stand in 
one thought, and see that things are thus or thus, that 
perception is law for him and me. We are both there, 
both act. But if, without carrying him into the 
thought, I look over into his plot, and, guessing how 
it is with him, ordain this or that, he will never obey 
me. This is the history of governments, — one man 
does something which is to bind another. A man 
who cannot be acquainted with me, taxes me ; looking 
from afar at me, ordains that a part of my labor shall 
go to this or that whimsical end, not as I but as he 
happens to fancy. Behold the consequence. Of all 
debts, men are least willing to pay the taxes. What 
a satire is this on government ! Everywhere they 
think they get their money's worth, except for these. 

Hence, the less government we have, the better, 
— the fewer laws, and the less confided power. The 
antidote to this abuse of formal Government, is, the 
influence of private character, the growth of the Indi- 
vidual ; the appearance of the principal to surpersede 



46o ESSAY VIL 

the proxy ; the appearance of the wise man, of whom 
the existing government is, it must be owned, but a 
shabby imitation. That which all things tend to 
educe, which freedom, cultivation, intercourse, revolu- 
tions, go to form and deliver, is character ; that is the 
end of nature, to reach unto this coronation of her 
king. To educate the wise man, the State exists ; 
and with the appearance of the wise man, the State 
expires. The appearance of character makes the State 
unnecessary. The wise man is' the State. He needs 
no army, fort, or navy, — he loves men too well ; no 
bribe, or feast, or palace, to draw friends to him ; no 
vantage ground, no favorable circumstance. He needs 
no library, for he has not done thinking ; no church, 
for he is a prophet ; no statute-book, for he has the 
lawgiver ; no money, for he is value ; no road, for he 
is at home where he is ; no experience, for the life of 
the creator shoots through him, and looks from his 
eyes. He has no personal friends, for he who has the 
spell to draw the prayer and piety of all men unto him, 
needs not husband and educate a few, to share with 
him a select and poetic life. His relation to men is 
angelic ; his memory is myrrh to them ; his presence, 
frankincense and flowers. 

We think our civilization near its meridian, but we 
are yet only at the cock-crowing and the morning star. 
In our barbarous society the influence of character is 
in its infancy. As a political power, as the rightful 
lord who is to tumble all rulers from their chairs, its 
presence is hardly yet suspected. Mai thus and Ri- 
cardo quite omit it ; the Annual Register is silent ; in 
the Conversations' Lexicon, it is not set down; the 



POLITICS. 461 

President's Message, the Queen's Speech, have not 
mentioned it; and yet it is never nothing. Every 
thought which genius and piety throw into the world, 
alters the world. The gladiators in the lists of power 
feel, through all their frocks of force and simulation, 
the presence of worth. I think the very strife of trade 
and ambition are confession of this divinity ; and suc- 
cesses in those fields are the poor amends, the fig-leaf 
with which the shamed soul attempts to hide its naked- 
ness. I find the like unwilling homage in all quar- 
ters. It is because we know how much is due from 
us, that we are impatient to show some petty talent 
as a substitute for worth. We are haunted by a con- 
science of this right to grandeur of character, and are 
false to. it. But each of us has some talent, can do 
somewhat useful, or graceful, or formidable, or amus- 
ing, or lucrative. That we do, as an apology to oth- 
ers and to ourselves, for not reaching the mark of a 
good and equal life. But it does not satisfy ms, whilst 
we thrust it on the notice of our companions. It may 
throw dust in their eyes, but does not smooth our 
own brow, or give us the tranquillity of the strong 
when we walk abroad. We do penance as we go. 
Our talent is a sort of expiation, and we are constrained 
to reflect on our splendid moment, with a certain 
humiliation, as somewhat too fine, and not as one act 
of many acts, a fair expression of our permanent en- 
ergy. Most persons of ability meet in society with a 
kind of tacit appeal. Each seems to say, < I am not 
all here.' Senators and presidents have climbed so 
high with pain enough, not because they think the 
place specially agreeable, but as an apology for real 



46a JESS AY VIL 

worth, and to vindicate their manhood in our eyes. 
This conspicuous chair is their compensation to them- 
selves for being of a poor, cold, hard nature. They 
must do what they can. Like one class of forest ani- 
mals, they have nothing but a prehensile tail : climb 
they must, or crawl. If a man found himself so rich- 
natured that he could enter into strict relations with 
the best persons, and make life serene around him by 
the dignity and sweetness of his behavior, could he 
afford to circumvent the favor of the caucus and the 
press, and covet relations so hollow and pompous as 
those of a politician ? Surely nobody would be a char- 
latan, who could afford to be sincere. 

The tendencies of the times favor the idea of self- 
government, and leave the individual, for all code, to 
the rewards and penalties of his own constitution, 
which work with more energy than we believe, whilst 
we depend on artificial restraints. The movement in 
this direction has been very marked in modern history. 
Much has been blind and discreditable, but the nature 
of the revolution is not affected by the vices of the re- 
volters ; for this is a purely moral force. It was 
never adopted by any party in history, neither can be. 
It separates the individual from all party, and unites 
him, at the same time, to the race. It promises a 
recognition of higher rights than those of personal 
freedom, or the security of property. A man has a 
right to be employed, to be trusted, to be loved, to be 
revered. The power of love, as the basis of a State, 
has never been tried. We must not imagine that all 
things are lapsing into confusion, if every tender prot- 
estant be not compelled to bear his part in certain so- 



POLITICS. 463 

cial conventions : nor doubt that roads can be built, 
letters carried, and the fruit of labor secured, when 
the government of force is at an end. Are our meth- 
ods now so excellent that all competition is hopeless ? 
could not a nation of friends even devise better ways ? 
On the other hand, let not the most conservative and 
timid fear anything from a premature surrender of 
the bayonet, and the system of force. For, according 
to the order of nature, which is quite superior to our 
will, it stands thus ; there will always be a govern- 
ment of force, where men are selfish ; and when they 
are pure enough to abjure the code of force, they will 
be wise enough to see how these public ends of the 
post-office, of the highway, of commerce, and the ex- 
change of property, of museums and libraries, of insti- 
tutions of art and science, can be answered. 

We live in a very low state of the world, and pay 
unwilling tribute to governments founded on force. 
There is not, among the most religious and instructed 
men of the most religious and civil nations, a reliance 
on the moral sentiment, and a sufficient belief in the 
unity of things to persuade them that society can be 
maintained without artificial restraints, as well as the 
solar system ; or that the private citizen might be rea- 
sonable, and a good neighbor, without the hint of a 
jail or a confiscation. What is strange too, there 
never was in any man sufficient faith in the power of 
rectitude, to inspire him with the broad design of ren- 
ovating the State on the principle of right and love. 
All those who have pretended this design, have been 
partial reformers, and have admitted in some manner 
the supremacy of the bad State. I do not call to 



464 ESSAY VII. 

mind a single human being who has steadily denied 
the authority of the laws, on the simple ground of his 
own moral nature. Such designs, full of genius and 
full of fate as they are, are not entertained except 
avowedly as air-pictures. If the individual who ex- 
hibits them, dare to think them practicable, he disgusts 
scholars and churchmen; and men of talent, and 
women of superior sentiments, cannot hide their con- 
tempt. Not the less does nature continue to fill the 
heart of youth with suggestions of this enthusiasm, 
and there are now men, — if indeed I can speak in 
the plural number, — more exactly, I will say, I have 
just been conversing with one man, to whom no 
weight of adverse experience will make it for a mo- 
ment appear impossible, that thousands of human be- 
ings might exercise towards each other the grandest 
and simplest sentiments, as well as a knot of friends, 
or a pair of lovers. 



NOMINALIST AND REALIST. 



In countless upward-striving waves 

The moon-drawn tide-wave strives : 

In thousand far-transplanted grafts 

The parent fruit survives j 

So, in the new-born millions, 

The perfect Adam lives. 

Not less are summer-mornings dear 

To every child they wake, 

And each with novel life his sphere 

Fills for his proper sake. 



ESSAY vm. 



NOMINALIST AND REALIST. 




CANNOT often enough say, that a man is 
only a relative and representative nature. 
Each is a hint of the truth, but far enough 
from being that truth, v/hich yet he quite 
newly and inevitably suggests to us. If I seek it in 
him, I shall not find it. Could any man conduct into 
me the pure stream of that which he pretends to be ! 
Long afterwards, I find that quality elsewhere which 
he promised me. The genius of the Platonists is in- 
toxicating to the student, yet how few particulars of 
it can I detach from all their books. The man mo- 
mentarily stands for the thought, but will not bear 
examination ; and a society of men will cursorily rep- 
resent well enough a certain quality and culture, for 
example, chivalry or beauty of manners, but separate 
them, and there is no gentleman and no lady in the 
group. The least hint sets us on the pursuit of a 
character, which no man reahzes. We have such ex- 
orbitant eyes, that on seeing the smallest arc, we 
complete the curve, and when the curtain is lifted 
from the diagram which it seemed to veil, we are 
vexed to find that no more was drawn, than just that 



468 ESSAY VIIL 

fragment of an arc which we first beheld. We are 
greatly too liberal in our construction of each other's 
faculty and promise. Exactly what the parties have 
already done, they shall do again ; but that which we 
inferred from their nature and inception, they will not 
do. That is in nature, but not in them. That hap- 
pens in the world, which we often witness in a public 
debate. Each of the speakers expresses himself im- 
perfectly ; no one of them hears much that another 
says, such is the preoccupation of mind of each ; and 
the audience, who have only to hear and not to speak, 
judge very wisely and superiorly how wrongheaded 
and unskilful is each of the debaters to his own affair. 
Great men or men of great gifts you shall easily find, 
but symmetrical men never. When I meet a pure 
intellectual force, or a generosity of affection, I believe, 
here then is man ; and am presently mortified by the 
discovery, that this individual is no more available to 
his own or to the general ends, than his companions ; 
because the power which drew my respect, is not sup- 
ported by the total symphony of his talents. All per- 
sons exist to society by some shining trait of beauty 
or utility, which they have. We borrow the propor- 
tions of the man from that one fine feature, and finish 
the portrait symmetrically ; which is false ; for the rest 
of his body is small or deformed. I observe a person 
who makes a good public appearance, and conclude 
thence the perfection of his private character, on which 
this is based ; but he has no private character. He is 
a graceful cloak or lay-figure for holidays. All our 
poets, heroes, and saints, fail utterly in some one or 
in many parts to satisfy our idea, fail to draw our 



NOMINALIST AND REALIST. 469 

spontaneous interest, and so leave us without any 
hope of realization but in our own future. Our exag- 
geration of all fine characters arises from the fact, 
that we identify each in turn with the soul. But 
there are no such men as we fable ; no Jesus, nor Peri- 
cles, nor Caesar, nor Angelo, nor Washington, such 
as we have made. We consecrate a great deal of 
nonsense, because it was allowed by great men. There 
is none without his foible. I verily believe if an an- 
gel should come to chant the chorus of the moral law, 
he would eat too much gingerbread, or take liberties 
with private letters, or do some precious atrocity. It 
is bad enough that our geniuses cannot do anything 
useful, but it is worse that no man is fit for society 
who has fine traits. He is admired at a distance, but 
he cannot come near without appearing a cripple. 
The men of fine parts protect themselves by solitude, 
or by courtesy, or by satire, or by an acid worldly 
manner, each concealing, as he best can, his incapaci- 
ty for useful association, but they want either love or 
self-reliance. 

Our native love of reality joins with this experience 
to teach us a little reserve, and to dissuade a too sud- 
den surrender to the brilliant qualities of persons. 
Young people admire talents or particular excellences ; 
as we grow older, we value total powers and effects, 
as, the impression, the quality, the spirit of men and 
things. The genius is all. The man, — it is his 
system : we do not try a solitary word or act, but his 
habit. The acts which you praise, I praise not, since 
they are departures from his faith, and are mere com- 
pliances. The magnetism which arranges tribes and 



470 JESSAY VIIL 

races in one polarity is alone to be respected; the men 
are steel-filings. Yet we unjustly select a particle, 
and say, ^' steel-filing number one ! what heart- 
drawings I feel to thee ! what prodigious virtues are 
these of thine ! how constitutional to thee, and incom- 
municable ! " Whilst we speak, the loadstone is with- 
drawn ; down falls our filing in a heap with the rest, 
and we continue our mummery to the wretched shav- 
ing. Let us go for universals; for the magnetism, 
not for the needles. Human life and its persons are 
poor empirical pretensions. A personal influence is 
an ignis fatuus. If they say, it is great, it is great ; if 
they say, it is small, it is small; you see it, and you 
see it not, by turns ; it borrows all its size from the 
momentary estimation of the speakers : the Will-of- 
the-wisp vanishes if you go too near, vanishes if you 
go too far, and only blazes at one angle. Who can 
tell if Washington be a great man, or no ? Who can 
telLif Franklin be 1 Yes, or any but the twelve, or 
six, or three great gods of fame ? And they, too, 
loom and fade before the eternal. 

We are amphibious creatures, weaponed for two 
elements, having two sets of faculties, the particular 
and the catholic. We adjust our instrument for gen- 
eral observation, and sweep the heavens as easily as we 
pick out a single figure in the terrestrial landscape. 
We are practically skilful in detecting elements, for 
which we have no place in our theory, and no name. 
Thus we are very sensible of an atmospheric influence 
in men and in bodies of men, not accounted for in an 
arithmetical addition of all their measurable properties. 
There is a genius of a nation, which is not to be found 



NOMINALIST AND REALIST, 471 

in the numerical citizens, but which characterizes the 
society. England, strong, punctual, practical, well- 
spoken England, I should not find, if I should go to 
the island to seek it. In the parliament, in the play- 
house, at dinner-tables, I might see a great number of 
rich, ignorant, book-read, conventional, proud men, — 
many old women, — and not anywhere the English- 
man who made the good speeches, combined the accu- 
rate engines, and did the bold and nervous deeds. It 
is even worse in America, where, from the intellectual 
quickness of the race, the genius of the country is more 
splendid in its promise, and more slight in its perform- 
ance. Webster cannot do the work of Webster. We 
conceive distinctly enough the French, the Spanish, 
the German genius, and it is not the less real, that 
perhaps we should not meet in either of those nations, 
a single individual who corresponded with the type. 
We infer the spirit of the nation in great measure 
from the language, which is a sort of monument, to 
which each forcible individual in a course of many 
hundred years has contributed a stone. And, univer- 
sally, a good example of this social force, is the veraci- 
ty of language, which cannot be debauched. In any 
controversy concerning morals, an appeal may be made 
with safety to the sentiments, which the language of 
the people expresses. Proverbs, words, and grammar 
inflections convey the public sense with more purity 
and precision, than the wisest individual. 

In the famous dispute with the Nominalists, the 
Realists had a good deal of reason. General ideas 
are essences. They are our gods : they round and en- 
noble the most partial and sordid way of living. Our 



472 JESSAY VIIL 

proclivity to details cannot quite degrade our life, 
and divest it of poetry. The day-laborer is reckoned 
as standing at the foot of the social scale, yet he is 
saturated v^ith the laws of the world. His measures 
are the hours ; morning and night, solstice and equi- 
nox, geometry, astronomy, and all the lovely accidents 
of nature play through his mind. Money, which rep- 
resents the prose of life, and which is hardly spoken of 
in parlors without an apology, is, in its effects and 
laws, as beautiful as roses. Property keeps the ac- 
counts of the world, and is always moral. The prop- 
erty will be found where the labor, the wisdom, and 
the virtue have been in nations, in classes, and (the 
whole life time considered, with the compensations) 
in the individual also. How wise the world appears, 
when the laws and usages of nations are largely de- 
tailed, and the completeness of the municipal system 
is considered ! Nothing is left out. If you go into 
the markets, and the custom-houses, the insurers' and 
notaries' offices, the offices of sealers of weights and 
measures, of inspection of provisions, — it will appear 
as if one man had made it all. Wherever you go, a 
wit like your own has been before you, and has real- 
ized its thought. The Eleusinian mysteries, the Egyp- 
tian architecture, the Indian astronomy, the Greek 
sculpture, show that there always were seeing and 
knowing men in the planet. The world is full of 
masonic ties, of guilds, of secret and public legions of 
honor ; that of scholars, for example ; and that of 
gentlemen fraternizing with the upper class of every 
country and every culture. 

I am very much struck in literature by the appear- 



NOMINALIST AND REALIST, 473 

ance, that one person wrote all the books ; as if the 
editor of a journal planted his body of reporters in 
different parts of the field of action, and relieved some 
by others from time to time ; but there is such equality 
and identity both of judgment and point of view in 
the narrative, that it is plainly the work of one all- 
seeing, all-hearing gentleman. I looked into Pope's 
Odyssey yesterday : it is as correct and elegant after 
our canon of to-day, as if it were newly written. The 
modernness of all good books seems to give me an 
existence as wide as man. What is well done, I feel 
as if I did ; what is ill done, I reck not of. Shake- 
speare's passages of passion (for example, in Lear and 
Hamlet) are in the very dialect of the present year. I 
am faithful again to the whole over the members in 
my use of books. I find the most pleasure in reading 
a book in a manner least flattering to the author. I 
read Proclus, and sometimes Plato, as I might read a 
dictionary, for a mechanical help to the fancy and the 
imagination. I read for the lustres, as if one should 
use a fine picture in a chromatic experiment, for its 
rich colors. 'T is not Proclus, but a piece of nature 
and fate that I explore. It is a greater joy to see the 
author's author, than himself. A higher pleasure of 
the same kind I found lately at a concert, where I 
went to hear Handel's Messiah. As the master over- 
powered the littleness and incapableness of the per- 
formers, and made them conductors of his electricity, 
so it was easy to observe what efforts nature was mak- 
ing through so many hoarse, wooden, and imperfect 
persons, to jn'oduce beautiful voices, fluid and soul- 
guided men and women. The genius of nature was 
paramount at the oratorio. 



474 ESSAY VIIL 

This preference of the genius to the parts is the 
secret of that deification of art, which is found in all 
superior minds. Art, in the artist, is proportion, or, 
a habitual respect to the whole by an eye loving beauty 
in details. And the wonder and charm of it is the 
sanity in insanity which it denotes. Proportion is al- 
most impossible to human beings. There is no one 
who does not exaggerate. In conversation, men are 
encumbered with personality, and talk too much. In 
modern sculpture, picture, and poetry, the beauty is 
miscellaneous ; the artist works here and there, and at 
all points, adding and adding, instead of unfolding the 
unit of his thought. Beautiful details we must have, 
or no artist : but they must be means and never other. 
The eye must not lose sight for a moment of the pur- 
pose. Lively boys write to their ear and eye, and the 
cool reader finds nothing but sweet jingles in it. 
When they grow older they respect the argument. 

We obey the same intellectual integrity, when we 
study in exceptions the law of the world. Anomalous 
facts, as the never quite obsolete rumors of magic and 
demonology, and the new allegations of phrenologists 
and neurologists, are of ideal use. They are good in- 
dications. Homoeopathy is insignificant as an art of 
healing, but of great value as criticism on the hygeia 
or medical practice of the time. So with Mesmer- 
ism, Swedenborgism, Fourierism, and the Millennial 
Church ; they are poor pretensions enough, but good 
criticism on the science, philosophy, and preaching of 
the day. For these abnormal insights of the adepts, 
ought to be normal, and things of course. 

All things show us, that on every side we are very 



NOMINALIST AND REALIST. 475 

near to the best. It seems not worth while to execute 
with too much pains some one intellectual, or sestheti- 
cal, or civil feat, when presently the dream will scatter, 
and we shall burst into universal power. The reason 
of idleness and of crime is the deferring of our hope^. 
Whilst we are waiting, we beguile the time with jokes, 
with sleep, with eating, and with crimes. 

Thus we settle it in our cool libraries, that all the 
agents with which we deal are subalterns, which we 
can well afford to let pass, and life will be simpler 
when we live at the centre, and flout the surfaces. I 
wish to speak with all respect of persons, but some- 
times I must pinch myself to keep awake, and preserve 
the due decorum. They melt so fast into each other, 
that they are like grass and trees, and it needs an effort 
to treat them as individuals. Though the uninspired 
man certainly finds persons a conveniency in house- 
hold matters, the divine man does not respect them : 
he sees them as a rack of clouds, or a fleet of ripples 
which the wind drives over the surface of the water. 
But this is flat rebellion. Nature will not be Budd- 
hist : she resents generalizing, and insults the philos- 
opher in every moment with a million of fresh partic- 
ulars. It is all idle talking : as much as a man is a 
whole, so is he also a part ; and it were partial not to 
see it. What you say in your pompous distribution 
only distributes you into your class and section. You 
have not got rid of parts b}^ denying them, but are 
the more partial. You are one thing, but nature is 
one thing and the other thing, in the same moment. She 
will not remain orbed in a thought, but rushes into 



476 ESSAY VI I L 

persons ; and when each person, inflamed to a fury of 
personality, would conquer all things to his poor 
crotchet, she raises up against him another person, 
and by many persons incarnates again a sort of whole. 
She will have all. Nick Bottom cannot play all the 
parts, work it how he may : there will be somebody 
else, and the world will be round. Everything must 
have its flower or effort at the beautiful, coarser or 
finer according to its stuff". They relieve and recom- 
mend each other, and the sanity of society is a balance 
of a thousand insanities. She punishes abstractionists, 
and will only forgive an induction which is rare and 
casual. We like to come to a height of land and see 
the landscape, just as we value a general remark in 
conversation. But it is not the intention of nature 
that we should live by general views. We fetch fire 
and water, run about all day among the shops and 
markets, and get our clothes and shoes made and 
mended, and are the victims of these details, and once 
in a fortnight we arrive perhaps at a rational moment. 
If we were not thus infatuated, if we saw the real from 
hour to hour, we should not be here to write and to 
read, but should have been burned or frozen long ago. 
^he would never get anything done, if she suffered ad- 
mirable Crichtons, and universal geniuses. She loves 
better a wheelwright who dreams all night of wheels, 
and a groom who is part of his horse : for she is full 
of work, and these are her hands. As the frugal far- 
mer takes care that his cattle shall eat down the rowen, 
and swine shall eat the waste of his house, and poul- 
try shall pick the crumbs, so our economical mother 
despatches a new genius and habit of mind into every 



NOMINALIST AND REALIST. 



477 



district and condition of existence, plants an eye wher- 
ever a new ray of light can fall, and gathering up 
into some man every property in the universe, estab- 
lishes thousandfold occult mutual attractions among 
her offspring, that all this wash and waste of power 
may be imparted and exchanged. 

Great dangers undoubtedly accrue from this incar- 
nation and distribution of the godhead, and hence na- 
ture has her maligners, as if she were Circe ; and Al- 
phonso of Castile fancied he could have given useful 
advice. But she does not go unprovided ; she has 
hellebore at the bottom of the cup. Solitude would 
ripen a plentiful crop of despots. The recluse thinks 
of men as having his manner, or as not having his 
manner ; and as having degrees of it, more and less. 
But when he comes into a public assembly, he sees 
that men have very different manners from his own, 
and in their way admirable. In his childhood and 
youth, he has had many checks and censures, and 
thinks modestly enough of his own endowment. 
When afterwards he comes to unfold it in propitious 
circumstance, it seems the only talent : he is delighted 
with his success, and accounts himself already the 
fellow of the great. But he goes into a mob, into a 
banking-house, into a mechanic's shop, into a mill, 
into a laboratory, into a ship, into a camp, and in each 
new place he is no better than an idiot : other talents 
take place, and rule the hour. The rotation which 
whirls every leaf and pebble to the meridian, reaches 
to ever}»»gift of man, and we all take turns at the top. 

For nature, who abhors mannerism, has set her 
heart on breaking up all styles and tricks, and it is so 



478 ESSAY VIIL 

much easier to do what one has done before, than to 
dp a new thing, that there is a perpetual tendency to 
a set mode. In every conversation, even the highest, 
there is a certain trick, which may be soon learned by 
an acute person, and then that particular style con- 
tinued indefinitely. Each man, too, is a tyrant in ten- 
dency, because he would impose his idea on others ; 
and their trick is their natural defence. Jesus would 
absorb the race ; but Tom Paine or the coarsest blas- 
phemer helps humanity by resisting this exuberance 
of power. Hence the immense benefit of party in pol- 
itics, as it reveals faults of character in a chief, which 
the intellectual force of the persons, with ordinary op- 
portunity, and not hurled into aphelion by hatred, 
could not have seen. Since we are all so stupid, what 
benefit that there should be two stupidities ! It is 
like that brute advantage, so essential to astronomy, of 
having the diameter of the earth's orbit for a base of 
its triangles. Democracy is morose, and runs to an- 
archy, but in the state, and in the schools, it is indis- 
pensable to resist the consolidation of all men into a 
few men. If John was perfect, why are you and I 
alive 1 As long as any man exists, there is some need 
of him ; let him fight for his own. A new poet has 
appeared ; a new character approached us : why should 
we refuse to eat bread, until we have found his regi- 
ment and section in our old army-files ? Why not a 
new man ? Here is a new enterprise of Brook Farm, 
of Skeneateles, of Northampton : why so impatient to 
baptize them Essenes, or Port-Royalists, or Shakers, 
or by any knc^n and efiete name ? Let it be a new 
way of living. Why have only two or three ways of 



NOMINALIST AND REALIST, 479 

life, and not thousands ? Every man is wanted, and 
no man is wanted much. We came this time for con- 
diments, not for corn. We want the great genius 
only for joy ; for one star more in our constellation, 
for one tree more in our grove. But he thinks we 
wish to belong to him, as he wishes to occupy us. He 
greatly mistakes us. I think I have done well, if I 
have acquired a new word from a good author ; and 
my business with him is to find my own, though it 
were only to melt him down into an epithet or an im- 
age for daily use. 

" Into paint will I grind thee, my bride I " 

To embroil the confusion, and make it impossible 
to arrive at any general statement, when we have in- 
sisted on the imperfection of iodividuals, our affections 
and our experience urge that every individual is enti- 
tled to honor, and a very generous treatment is sure 
to be repaid. A recluse sees only two or three per- 
sons, and allows them all their room ; they spread 
themselves at large. The statesman looks at many, 
and compares the few habitually with others, and these 
look less. Yet are they not entitled to this generosity 
of reception? and is not munificence the means of in- 
sight? For though gamesters say, that the cards 
beat all the players, though they were never so skilful, 
yet in the contest we are now considering, the players 
are also the game, and share the power of the cards. 
If you criticise a fine genius, the odds are that you 
are out of your reckoning, and, instead of the poet, 
are censuring your own caricature of him. For there 
is somewhat spheral and infinite in every man, espe- 



48o ^>S'^^F VIIL 

cially in every genius, which, if you can come very 
near him, sports with all your limitations. For, right- 
ly, every man is a channel through which heaven 
floweth, and, whilst I fancied I was criticising him, I 
was censuring or rather terminating my own soul. 
After taxing Goethe as a courtier, artificial, unbeliev- 
ing, worldly, — I took up this book of Helena, and 
found him an Indian of the wilderness, a piece of pure 
nature like an apple or an oak, large as morning or 
night, and virtuous as a brier-rose. 

But care is taken that the whole tune shall be 
played. If we were not kept among surfaces, every- 
thing would be large and universal : now the excluded 
attributes burst in on us with the more brightness, 
that they have been excluded. " Your turn now, my 
turn next,'' is the rule of the game. The universality 
being hindered in its primary form, comes in the sec- 
ondary form of all sides : the points come in succession 
to the meridian, and by the speed of rotation, a new 
whole is formed. Nature keeps herself whole, and 
her representation complete in the experience of each 
nnnd. She suffers no seat to be vacant in her college. 
It is the secret of the world that all things subsist, and 
do not die, but only retire a little from sight, and after- 
wards return again. Whatever does not concern us, 
is concealed from us. As soon as a person is no long- 
er related to our present well-being, he is concealed, or 
dies, as we say. Really, all things and persons are 
related to us, but according to our nature, they act 
on us not at once, but in succession, and we are made 
aware of their presence one at a time. All persons, 
all things which \ve have known, are here present, and 



NOMINALIST AND REALIST. 481 

many more than we see ; the world is full. As the 
ancient said, the world is a plenum or solid ; and if we 
saw all things that really surround us, we should be 
imprisoned and unable to move. For, though noth- 
ing is impassable to the soul, but all things are pervi- 
ous to it, and like highways, yet this is only whilst the 
soul does not see them. As soon as the soul sees any 
object, it stops before that object. Therefore, the di- 
vine Providence, which keeps the universe open in 
every direction to the soul, conceals all the furniture 
and all the persons that do not concern a particular 
soul, from the senses of that individual. Through 
solidest eternal things, the man finds his road, as if 
they did not subsist, and does not once suspect their 
being. As soon as he needs a new object, suddenly 
he beholds it, and no longer attempts to pass through 
it, but takes another way. When he has exhausted 
for the time the nourishment to be drawn from any 
one person or thing, that object is withdrawn from his 
observation, and though still in his immediate neigh- 
borhood, he does not suspect its presence. Nothing is 
dead : men feign themselves dead, and endure mock 
funerals and mournful obituaries, and there they stand 
looking out of the window, sound and well, in some 
new and strange disguise. Jesus is not dead : he is 
very well alive : nor John, nor Paul, nor Mahomet, nor 
Aristotle ; at times we believe we have seen them all, 
and could easily tell the names under which they go. 

If we cannot make voluntary and conscious steps 

in the admirable science of universals, let us see the 

parts wisely, and infer the genius of nature from the 

best particulars with a becoming charity. "What is 

31 



482 ESSAY VIIL 

best in each kind is an index of what should be the 
average of that thing. Love shows me the opulence 
of nature, by disclosing to me in my friend a hidden 
wealth, and I infer an equal depth of good in every 
other direction. It is commonly said by farmers, that 
a good pear or apple costs no more time or pains to 
rear, than a poor one ; so I would have no work of 
art, no speech, or action, or thought, or friend, but 
the best. 

The end and the means, the gamester and the game, 
— life is made up of the intermixture and reaction of 
these two amicable powers, whose marriage appears 
beforehand monstrous, as each denies and tends to 
abolish the other. We must reconcile the contradic- 
tions as we can, but their discord and their concord 
introduce wild absurdities into our thinking and 
speech. No sentence will hold the whole truth, and 
the only way in which we can be just, is by giving 
ourselves the lie ; Speech is better than silence ; silence 
is better than speech ; — All things are in contact ; 
every atom has a sphere of repulsion ; — Things are, 
and are not, at the same time ; — and the like. All 
the universe over, there is but one thing, this old Two- 
Face, creator-creature, mind-matter, right-wrong, of 
which any proposition may be aflfirmed or denied. 
Yery fitly, therefore, I assert, that every man is a 
partialist, that nature secures him as an instrument by 
self-conceit, preventing the tendencies to religion and 
science ; and now further assert, that, each man's ge- 
nius being nearly and affectionately explored, he is 
justified in his individuality, as his nature is found to 
be immense ; and now I add, that every man is a 



NOMINALIST AND REALIST. 483 

universalist also, and, as our earth, whilst it spins on 
its own axis, spins all the time around the sun through 
the celestial spaces, so the least of its rational children, 
the most dedicated to his private affair, works out, 
though as it were under a disguise, the universal prob- 
lem. We fancy men are individuals ; so are pump- 
kins ; but every pumpkin in the field goes through 
every point of pumpkin history. The rabid democrat, 
as soon as he is senator and rich man, has ripened be- 
yond possibility of sincere radicalism, and unless he 
can resist the sun, he must be conservative the remain- 
der of his days. Lord Eldon said in his old age, 
"that, if he were to begin life again, he would be 
damned but he would begin as agitator." 

We hide this universality, if we can, but it appears 
at all points. We are as ungrateful as children. 
There is nothing we cherish and strive to draw to us, 
but in some hour we turn and rend it. We keep a 
running fire of sarcasm at ignorance and the life of the 
senses; then goes by, perchance, a fair girl, a piece 
of life, gay and happy, and making the commonest 
offices beautiful, by the energy and heart with which 
she does them, and seeing this, we admire and love 
her and them, and say, "Lo! a genuine creature of 
the fair earth, not dissipated, or too early ripened by 
books, philosophy, religion, society, or care ! " insin- 
uating a treachery and contempt for all we had so 
long loved and wrought in ourselves and others. 

If we could have any security against moods ! If 
the profoundest prophet could be holden to his words, 
and the hearer who is ready to sell all and join the 
crusade, could have any certificate that to-morrow his 



484 ESSAY yiii. 

prophet shall not unsay his testimony ! But the 
Truth sits veiled there on the Bench, and never inter- 
poses an adamantine syllable ; and the most sincere 
and revolutionary doctrine, put as if the ark of God 
were carried forward some furlongs, and planted there 
for the succor of the world, shall in a few weeks be 
coldly set aside by the same speaker, as morbid ; " I 
thought I was right, but I was not," — and the same 
immeasurable credulity demanded for new audacities. 
If we were not of all opinions ! if"we did not in any 
moment shift the platform on which we stand, and 
look and speak from another ! if there could be any 
regulation, any " one-hour-rule,'' that a man should 
never leave his point of view, without sound of trum- 
pet. I am always insincere, as always knowing there 
are other moods. 

How sincere and confidential we can be, saying all 
that lies in the mind, and yet go away feeling that all 
is yet unsaid, from the incapacity of the parties to 
know each other, although they use the same words ! 
My companion assumes to know my mood and habit 
of thought, and we go on from explanation to expla- 
nation, until all is said which words can, and we leave 
matters just as they were at first, because of that vi- 
cious assumption. Is it that every man believes every 
other to be an incurable partialist, and himself a uni- 
versalist '? I talked yesterday with a pair of philoso- 
phers : I endeavored to show my good men that I 
liked everything by turns, and nothing long ; that I 
loved the centre, but doated on the superficies ; that I 
loved man, if men seemed to me mice and rats ; that I 
revered saints, but woke up glad that the old pagan 



NOMINALIST AND REALIST, 485 

world stood its ground, and died hard; that I was 
glad of men of every gift and nobility, but would not 
live in their arms. Could they but once understand, 
that I loved to know that they existed, and heartily 
wished them God-speed, yet, out of my poverty of life 
and thought, had no word or welcome for them when 
they came to see me, and could well consent to their 
living in Oregon, for any claim I felt on them, it 
would be a great satisfaction. 



NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS. 



Iq the suburb, in the town, 
On the railway, in the square, 
Came a beam of goodness down 
Doubling daylight everywhere : 
Peace now each for malice takes, 
Beauty for his sinful weeds. 
For the angel Hope aye makes 
Him an angel whom she leads. 




NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS. 

A LECTURE READ BEFORE THE SOCIETY IN AMORT 
HALL, ON SUNDAY, MARCH 3, 1844. 

HOEVER has had opportunity of acquaint- 
ance with society in New England, during 
the last twenty-five years, with those mid- 
dle and with those leading sections that 
may constitute any just representation of the character 
and aim of the community, will have been struck with 
the great activity of thought and experimenting. His 
attention must be commanded by the signs that the 
Church, or religious party, is falling from the church 
nominal, and is appearing in temperance and non-re- 
sistance societies, in movements of abolitionists and 
of socialists, and in very significant assemblies, called 
Sabbath and Bible Conventions, — composed of ul- 
traists, of seekers, of all the soul of the soldiery of dis- 
sent, and meeting to call in question the authority of 
the Sabbath, of the priesthood, and of the church. In 
these movements, nothing was more remarkable than 
the discontent they begot in the movers. The spirit 
of protest and of detachment, drove the members 
of these Conventions to bear testimony against tlie 
church, and immediately afterward, to declare their 



490 LECTURE AT AMORY HALL. 

discontent with these Conventions, their independence^ 
of their colleagues, and their impatience of the meth- 
ods whereby they were working. They defied each 
other, like a congress of kings, each of whom had a 
realm to rule, and a way of his own that made con- 
cert unprofitable. What a fertility of projects for the 
salvation of the world ! One apostle thought all men 
should go to farming; and another, that no man 
should buy or sell; that the use of money was tho 
cardinal evil ; another, that the mischief was in our 
diet, that we eat and drink damnation. These made 
unleavened bread, and were foes to the death to fer- 
mentation. It was in vain urged by the housewife, 
that God made yeast, as well as dough, and loves fer- 
mentation just as dearly as he loves vegetation ; that 
fermentation develops the saccharine element in the 
grain, and makes it more palatable and more digesti- 
ble. No ; they wish the pure wheat, and will die but 
it shall not ferment. Stop, dear nature, these inces- 
sant advances of thine ; let us scotch these ever-rolling 
wheels ! Others attacked the system of agriculture ; 
the use of animal manures in farming ; and the tyran- 
ny of man over brute nature; these abuses polluted 
his food. The ox must be taken from the plough, 
and the horse from the cart, the hundred acres of the 
farm must be spaded, and the man must walk wher- 
ever boats and locomotives will not carry him. Eveu 
the insect world was to be defended, — that had been 
too long neglected, and a society for the protection of 
ground-worms, slugs, and mosquitos was to be incor- 
porated without delay. With these appeared the 
adepts of homoeopathy, of hydropathy, of mesmerism, 



NJSW ENGLAND REFORMERS, 491 

of phrenology, and their wonderful theories of the 
Christian miracles ! Others assailed particular voca- 
tions, as that of the lawyer, that of the merchant, of 
the manufacturer, of the clergyman, of the scholar. 
Others attacked the institution of marriage, as the foun- 
tain of social evils. Others devoted themselves to the 
worrying of churches and meetings for public wor- 
ship ; and the fertile forms of antinomianism among 
the elder puritans, seemed to have their match in the 
plenty of the new harvest of reform. 

With this din of opinion and debate, there was a 
keener scrutiny of institutions and domestic life than 
any we had known, there was sincere protesting against 
existing evils, and there were changes of employment 
dictated by conscience. No doubt, there was plentiful 
vaporing, and cases of backsliding might occur. But 
in each of these movements emerged a good result, a 
tendency to the adoption of simpler methods, and an 
assertion of the sufficiency of the private man. Thus 
it was directly in the spirit and genius of the age, 
what happened in one instance, when a church cen- 
sured and threatened to excommunicate one of its 
members, on account of the somewhat hostile part to 
the church, which his conscience led him to take in 
the anti-slavery business ; the threatened individual 
immediately excommunicated the church in a public 
and formal process. This has been several times re- 
peated : it was excellent when it was done the first 
time, but, of course, loses all value when it is copied. 
Every project in the history of reform, no matter how 
violent and surprising, is good, when it is the dictate 
of a man's genius and constitution, but very duU and 



492 LECTURE AT AMORY HALL, 

suspicious when adopted from another. It is right 
and beautiful in any man to say, "I will take this 
coat, or this book, or this measure of corn of yours," 
— in whom we see the act to be original, and to flow 
from the whole spirit and faith of him ; for then that 
taking will have a giving as free and divine ; but we 
are very easily disposed to resist the same generosity 
of speech, when we miss originality and truth to char- 
acter in it. 

There was in all the practical activities of New 
England; for the last quarter of a century, a gradual 
withdrawal of tender consciences from the social organ- 
izations. There is observable throughout, the contest 
between mechanical and spiritual methods, but with a 
steady tendency of the thoughtful and virtuous to a 
deeper belief and reliance on spiritual facts. 

In politics, for example, it is easy to see the progress 
of dissent. The country is full of rebellion ; the coun- 
try is full of kings. Hands off! let there be no con- 
trol and no interference in the administration of the 
affairs of this kingdom of me. Hence the growth of 
the doctrine and of the party of Free Trade, and the 
willingness to try that experiment, in the face of what 
appear incontestable facts. I confess, the motto of 
the Globe newspaper is so attractive to me, that I can 
seldom find much appetite to read what is below it in 
its columns, " The world is governed too much." So 
the country is frequently affording solitary examples of 
resistance to the government, solitary nullifiers, who 
throw themselves on their reserved rights ; nay, who 
have reserved all their rights; who reply to the as- 
sessor, and to the clerk of court, that they do not know 



NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS. 493 

the State; and embarrass the courts of law, by non- 
juring, and the commander-in-chief of the militia, by 
non-resistance. 

The same disposition to scrutiny and dissent ap- 
peared in civil, festive, neighborly, and domestic society. 
A restless, prying, conscientious criticism broke out in 
unexpected quarters. Who gave me the money with 
which I bought my coat ? Why should professional 
labor and that of the counting-house be paid so dis- 
proportionately to the labor of the porter and wood- 
sawyer ? This whole business of Trade gives me to 
pause and think, as it constitutes false relations be- 
tween men ; inasmuch as I am prone to count myself 
relieved of any responsibility to behave well and nobly 
to that person whom I pay with money, whereas if I 
had not that commodity, I should be put on my good 
behavior in all companies, and man would be a bene- 
factor to man, as being himself his only certificate 
that he had a right to those aids and services which 
each asked of the other. Am I not too protected a 
person ? is there not a wide disparity between the lot 
of me and the lot of thee, my poor brother, my poor 
sister ? Am I not defrauded of my best culture in the 
loss of those gymnastics which manual labor and the 
emergencies of poverty constitute? I find nothing 
nealthful or exalting in the smooth conventions of so- 
ciety ; I do not like the close air of saloons. I begin 
to suspect mj^self to be a prisoner, though treated with 
all this courtesy and luxury. I pay a destructive tax 
in my conformity. 

The same insatiable criticism may be traced in the 
efforts for the reform of Education. The popular edu- 



494 LECTURE AT AMORY HALL, 

cation has been taxed with a want of truth and na- 
ture. It was complained that an education to things 
was not given. We are students of words : we are 
shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation-rooms, 
for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a 
bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a 
thing. We cannot use our hands, or our legs, or our 
eyes, or our arms. We do not know an edible root in 
the woods, we cannot tell our course by the stars, nor 
the hour of the day by the sun. It is well if we can 
swim and skate. We are afraid of a horse, of a cow, 
of a dog, of a snake, of a spider. The Eoman rule 
was, to teach a boy nothing that he could not learn 
standing. The old English rule was, " All summer 
in the field, and all winter in the study." And it 
seems as if a man should learn to plant, or to fish, or 
to hunt, that he might secure his subsistence at all 
events, and not be painful to his friends and fellow- 
men. The lessons of science should be experimental 
also. The sight of the planet through a telescope, is 
worth all the course on astronomy : the shock of the 
electric spark in the elbow, outvalues all the theories : 
the taste of the nitrous oxide, the firing of an artificial 
volcano, are better than volumes of chemistry. 

One of the traits of the new spirit is the inquisition 
it fixed on our scholastic devotion to the dead lan- 
guages. The ancient languages, with great beauty of 
structure, contain wonderful remains of genius, which 
draw, and always will draw, certain likeminded men, 
— Greek men, and Roman men, in all countries, to 
their study ; but by a wonderful drowsiness of usage, 
they had exacted the study of all men. Once (say two 



NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS. 495 

centuries ago), Latin and Greek had a strict relation 
to all the science and culture there was in Europe, 
and the Mathematics had a momentary importance at 
some era of activity in physical science. These things 
became stereotyped as education^ as the manner of men 
is. But the Good Spirit never cared for the colleges, 
and though all men and boys were now drilled in 
Latin, Greek, and Mathematics, it had quite left these 
shells high and dry on the beach, and was now creat- 
ing and feeding other matters at other ends of the 
world. But in a hundred high schools and colleges, 
this warfare against common sense still goes on. 
Four, or six, or ten years, the pupil is parsing Greek 
and Latin, and as soon as he leaves the Univer- 
sity, as it is ludicrously styled, he shuts those books 
for the last time. Some thousands of young men 
are graduated at our colleges in this country every 
year, and the persons who, at forty years, still read 
Greek, can all be counted on your hand. I never 
met with ten.. Four or five persons I have seen who 
read Plato. 

But is not this absurd, that the whole liberal talent 
of this country should be directed in its best years on 
studies which lead to nothing ? What was the con- 
sequence ? Some intelligent persons said or thought : 
"Is that Greek and Latin some spell to conjure with, 
and not words of reason ? If the physician, the law- 
yer, the divine, never use it to come at their ends, I 
need never learn it to come at mine. Conjuring is 
gone out of fashion, and I will omit this conjugating, 
and go straight to affairs." So they jumped the Greek 
and Latin, and read law, medicine, or sermons, with- 



496 LECTURE AT AMORY HALL, 

out it. To the astonishment of all, the self-made men 
took even ground at once with the oldest of the regu- 
lar graduates, and in a few months the most conserva- 
tive circles of Boston and New York had quite forgot- 
ten who of their gownsmen was college-bred, and who 
was not. 

One tendency appears alike in the philosophical 
speculation, and in the rudest democratical move- 
ments, through all the petulance and all the puerility, 
the wish, namely, to cast aside the superfluous, and 
arrive at short methods, urged, as I suppose, by an 
intuition that the human spirit is equal to all emer- 
gencies alone, and that man is more often injured 
than helped by the means he uses. 

I conceive this gradual casting off of material aids, 
and the indication of growing trust in the private, self- 
supplied powers of the individual, to be the affirmative 
principle of the recent philosophy ; and that it is feel- 
ing its own profound truth, and is reaching forward 
at this very hour to the happiest conclusions. I read- 
ily concede that in this, as in every period of intellect- 
ual activity, there has been a noise of denial and 
protest ; much was to be resisted, much was to be got 
rid of by those who were reared in the old, before they 
could begin to affirm and to construct. Many a 
reformer perishes in his removal of rubbish, — and 
that makes the offensiveness of the class. They are 
partial ; they are not equal to the work they pretend. 
They lose their way ; in the assault on the kingdom 
of darkness, they expend all their energy on some 
accidental evil, and lose their sanity and power of ben- 
efit. It is of little moment that one or two or twenty 



NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS, 497 

errors of our social system be corrected, but of much 
that the man be in his senses. 

The criticism and attack on institutions which we 
have witnessed, has made one thing plain, that society 
gains nothing whilst a man, not himself renovated, 
attempts to renovate things around him : he has be- 
come tediously good in some particular, but negligent 
or narrow in the rest ; and hypocrisy and vanity are 
often the disgusting result. 

It is handsomer to remain in the establishment 
better than the establishment, and conduct that in the 
best manner, than to make a sally against evil by 
some single improvement, without supporting it by a 
total regeneration. Do not be so vain of your one ob- 
jection. Do you think there is only one ? Alas ! my 
good friend, there is no part of society or of life better 
than any other part. All our things are right and 
wrong together. The wave of evil washes all our insti- 
tutions alike. Do you complain of our Marriage ? Our 
marriage is no worse than our education, our diet, our 
trade, our social customs. Do you complain of the laws 
of Property ? It is a pedantry to give such importance 
to them. Can we not play the game of life with these 
counters as well as with those; in the institution of 
property, as well as out of it. Let into it the new and 
renewing principle of love, and propertyVill be univer- 
sality. No one gives the impression of superiority to the 
institution, which he must give who will reform it. It 
makes no difference what you say : you must make me 
feel that you are aloof from it ; by your natural and su- 
pernatural advantages, do easily see to the end of it, — 
do see how man can do without it. Now all men are 
32 



498 LECTURE AT AMORY HALL. 

on one side. No man deserves to be heard against 
property. Only Love, only an Idea, is against prop- 
erty, as we hold it. 

I cannot afford to be irritable and captious, nor to 
waste all my time in attacks. If I should go out of 
church whenever I hear a false sentiment, I could never 
stay there five minutes. But why come out ? the street 
is as false as the church, and when I get to my house, 
or to my manners, or to my speech, I have not got 
away from the lie. "When we see an eager assailant 
of one of these wrongs, a special reformer, we feel like 
asking him, What right have you, sir, to your one 
virtue ? Is virtue piecemeal ? This is a jewel amidst 
the rags of a beggar. 

In another way the right will be vindicated. In the 
midst of abuses, in the heart of cities, in the aisles of 
false churches, alike in one place and in another, — 
wherever, namely, a just and heroic soul finds itself, 
there it will do what is next at hand, and by the new 
quality of character it shall put forth, it shall abrogate 
that old condition, law, or school in which it stands, 
before the law of its own mind. 

If partiality was one fault of the movement party, 
the other defect was their reliance on Association. 
Doubts such as those I have intimated, drove many 
good persons to agitate the questions of social reform. 
But the revolt against the spirit of commerce, the 
spirit of aristocracy, and the inveterate abuses of cities, 
did not appear possible to individuals ; and to do bat- 
tle against numbers they armed themselves with num- 
bers, and against concert, they relied on new concert. 

Following, or advancing beyond the ideas of St. 



NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS, 499 

Simon, of Fourier, and of Owen, three communities 
have ah'eady been formed in Massathusetts on kindred 
plans, and many more in the country at large. They 
aim to give every member a share in the manual la- 
bor, to give an equal reward to labor and to talent, 
and to unite a liberal culture with an education to 
labor. The scheme offers, by the economies of as- 
sociated labor and expense, to make every member 
rich, on the same amount of property, that, in sepa- 
rate families, would leave every member poor. These 
new associations are composed of men and women of 
superior talents and sentiments : yet it may easily be 
questioned, whether such a community will draw, ex- 
cept in its beginnings, the able and the good ; whether 
those who have energy, will not prefer their chance 
of superiority and power in the world, to the humble 
certainties of the association ; whether such a retreat 
does not promise to become an asylum to those who 
have tried and failed, rather than a field to the strong ; 
and whether the members will not necessarily be frac- 
tions of men, because each finds that he cannot enter 
it without some compromise. Friendship and asso- 
ciation are very fine things, and a grand phalanx of 
the best of the human race, banded for some catholic 
object ; yes, excellent ; but remember that no society 
can ever be so large as one man. He in his friend- 
ship, in his natural and momentary associations, dou- 
bles or multiplies himself; but in the hour in which he 
mortgages himself to two or ten or twenty, he dwarfs 
himself below the stature of one. 

But the men of less faith could not thus believe, 
and to such, concert appears the sole specific of 



500 LECTURE AT AMORY HALL. 

strength. I have failed, and you have failed, but per- 
haps together we shall not fail. Our housekeeping 
is not satisfactory to us, but perhaps a phalanx, a 
community, might be. Many of us have differed in 
opinion, and we could find no man who could, make 
the truth plain ; but possibly a college, or an ecclesias- 
tical council might. I have not been able either to 
persuade my brother, or to prevail on myself, to disuse 
the traffic or the potation of brandy, but perhaps a 
pledge of total abstinence might eflfectually restrain 
us. The candidate my party votes for is not to be 
trusted with a dollar, but he will be honest in the Sen- 
ate, for we can bring public opinion to bear on him. 
Thus concert was the specific in all cases. But con- 
cert is neither better nor worse, neither more nor less 
potent than individual force. All the men in the 
world cannot make a statue walk and speak, cannot 
make a drop of blood, or a blade of grass, any more 
than one man can. But let there be one man, let 
there be truth in two men, in ten men, then is concert 
for the first time possible, because the force which 
moves the world is a new quality, and can never be 
furnished by adding whatever quantities of a different 
kind. What is the use of the concert of the false and 
the disunited '? There can be no concert in two, 
where there is no concert in one. When the individ- 
ual is not individual, but is dual ; when his thoughts 
look one way, and his actions another ; when his faith 
is traversed by his habits ; when his will, enlightened 
by reason, is warped by his sense ; when with one 
hand he rows, and with the other backs water, what 
concert can be ? 



NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS, 501 

I do not wonder at the interest these projects in- 
Bpire. The world is awaking to the idea of union, 
and these experiments show what it is thinking of. 
It is and will be magic. Men will live and communi- 
cate, and plough, and reap, and govern, as by added 
ethereal power, when once the}' are united ; as in a 
celebrated experiment, by expiration and respiration 
exactly together, four persons lift a heavy man from 
the ground by the little finger only, and without sense 
of weight. But this union must be inward, and not 
one of covenants, and is to be reached by a reverse 
of the methods they use. The union is only perfect, 
when all the uniters are isolated. It is the union of 
friends who live in different streets or towns. Each 
man, if he attempts to join himself to others, is on all 
sides cramped and diminished of his proportion ; and 
the stricter the union, the smaller and the more pitiful 
he is. But leave him alone, to recognize in every 
hour and place the secret soul, he will go up and down 
doing the works of a true member, and, to the aston- 
ishment of all, the work will be done with concert, 
though no man spoke. Government will be adaman- 
tine without any governor. The union must be ideal 
in actual individualism. 

I pass to the indication in some particulars of that 
faith in man, which the heart is preaching to us in 
these days, and which engages the more regard, from 
the consideration, that the speculations of one genera- 
tion are the history of the next following. 

In alluding just now to our system of education, I 
spoke of the deadness of its details. But it is open to 
graver criticism than the palsy of its members : it is a 



502 LECTURE AT AM DRY HALL, 

system of despair. The disease with which the hu- 
man mind now labors, is want of faith. Men do not 
believe in a power of education. We do not think we 
can speak to divine sentiments in man, and we do not 
try. We renounce all high aims. We believe that 
the defects of so many perverse and so many frivolous 
people, who make up society, are organic, and society 
is a hospital of incurables. A man of good sense but 
of little faith, whose compassion seemed to lead him 
to church as often as he went there, said to me : " that 
he liked to have concerts, and fairs, and churches, and 
other public amusements go on." I am afraid the 
remark is too honest, and comes from the same origin 
as the maxim of the tyrant, " If you would rule the 
world quietly, you must keep it amused." I notice, 
too, that the ground on which eminent public servants 
urge the claims of popular education is fear : " This 
country is filling up with thousands and millions of 
voters, and you must educate them to keep them from 
our throats." We do not believe that any education, 
any system of philosophy, any influence of genius, will 
ever give depth of insight to a superficial mind. Hav- 
ing settled ourselves into this infidelity, our skill is 
expended to procure alleviations, diversion, opiates. 
We adorn the victim with manual skill, his tongue 
with languages, his body with inoffensive and comely 
manners. So have we cunningly hid the tragedy of 
limitation and inner death we cannot avert. Is it 
strange that society should be devoured by a secret 
melancholy, which breaks through all its smiles, and 
all its gayety and games ? 

But even one step farther our infidelity has gone. 



NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS. 503 

It appears that some doubt is felt by good and wise 
men, whether really the happiness and probity of men 
is increased by the culture of the mind in those disci- 
plines to which we give the name of education. Un- 
happily, too, the doubt comes from scholars, from 
persons who have tried these methods. In their ex- 
perience, the scholar was not raised by the sacred 
thoughts amongst which he dwelt, but used them to 
selfish ends. He was a profane person, and became a 
showman, turning his gifts to a marketable use, and 
not to his own sustenance and growth. It was found 
that the intellect could be independently developed, 
that is, in separation from the man, as any single or- 
gan can be invigorated, and the result was monstrous. 
A canine appetite for knowledge was generated, which 
must still be fed, but was never satisfied, and this 
knowledge not being directed on action, never took 
the character of substantial, humane truth, blessing 
those whom it entered. It gave the scholar certain 
powers of expression, — the power of speech, the power 
of poetry, of literary art, — but it did not bring him to 
peace or to beneficence. 

When the literary class betray a destitution of faith, 
it is not strange that society should be disheartened 
and sensualized by unbelief. What remedy ? Life 
must be Uved on a higher plane. We must go up to 
a higher platform, to which we are always invited to 
ascend ; there, the whole aspect of things changes. I 
resist the scepticism of our education, and of our edu- 
cated men. I do not believe that the differences of 
opinion and character in men are organic. I do not 
recognize, beside the class of the good and the wise. 



504 LECTURE AT AMORY HALL. 

a permanent class of sceptics, or a class of conserva- 
tives, or of malignants, or of materialists. I do not 
believe in two classes. You remember the story of 
the poor v^^oman who importuned King Philip of 
Macedon to grant her justice, which Philip refused : 
the woman exclaimed, " I appeal : '^ the king, aston- 
ished, asked to whom she appealed : the woman re- 
plied, "From Philip drunk to Philip sober." The 
text will suit me very well. I believe not in two 
classes of men, but in man in two moods, in Philip 
drunk and Philip sober. I think, according to the 
good-hearted word of Plato, " Unwillingly the soul is 
deprived of truth." Iron conservative, miser, or thief, 
no man is, but by a supposed necessity, which he tol- 
erates by shortness or torpidity of sight. The soul 
lets no man go without some visitations and holidays 
of a diviner presence. It would be easy to show, by 
a narrow scanning of any man's biography, that we 
are not so wedded to our paltry performances of every 
kind, but that every man has at intervals the grace to 
scorn his performances, in comparing them with his 
belief of what he should do, that he puts himself on 
file side of his enemies, listening gladly to what they 
say of him, and accusing himself of the same things. 

What is it men love in Genius, but its infinite hope, 
which degrades all it has done "? Genius counts all 
its miracles poor and short. Its own idea it never 
executed. The Iliad, the Hamlet, the Doric column, 
the Eoman arch, the Gothic minster, the German an- 
them, when they are ended, the master casts behind 
him. How sinks the song in the waves of melody 
which the universe pours over his soul ! Before that 



NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS. 505 

gracious Infinite, out of which he drew these few 
strokes, how mean they look, though the praises of the 
world attend them. From the triumphs of his art, he 
turns with desire to this greater defeat. Let those 
admire who will. With silent joy he sees himself to he 
capable of a beauty that eclipses all which his hands 
have done, all which human hands have ever done. 

Well, we are all the children of genius, the children 
of virtue, — and feel their inspirations in our happier 
hours. Is not every man sometimes a radical in poli- 
tics ? Men are conservatives when they are least vig- 
orous, or when they are most luxurious. They are 
conservatives after dinner, or before taking their rest ; 
when they are sick, or aged : in the morning, or when 
their intellect or their conscience have been aroused, 
when they hear music, or when they read poetry, they 
are radicals. In the circle of the rankest tories that 
could be collected in England, Old or New, let a pow- 
erful and stimulating intellect, a man of great heart 
and mind, act on them, and very quickly these frozen 
conservators will yield to the friendly influence, these 
hopeless will begin to hope, these haters will begin to 
love, these immovable statues will begin to spin and 
revolve. I cannot help recalling the fine anecdote 
which Warton relates of Bishop Berkeley, when he was 
preparing to leave England, with his plan of planting 
the gospel among the American savages. " Lord Ba- 
thurst told me, that, the members of the Scriblerus Club 
being met at his house at dinner, they agreed to rally 
Berkeley, who was also his guest, on his scheme at 
Bermudas. Berkeley, having listened to the many 
lively things they had to say, begged to be heard in 



5o6 LECTURE AT AMORY HALL. 

his turn, and displayed his plan with such an astonish- 
ing and animating force of eloquence and enthusiasm, 
that they were struck dumb, and, after some pause, 
rose up all together with earnestness, exclaiming, * Let 
us set out with him immediately/ '^ Men in all ways 
are better than they seem. They like flattery for the 
moment, but they know the truth for their own. It 
is a foolish cowardice which keeps us from trusting 
them, and speaking to them rude truth. They resent 
your honesty for an instant, they will thank vou for it 
always. What is it we heartily wish«of each other ? 
Is it to be pleased and flattered ? No, but to be 
convicted and exposed, to be shamed out of our non- 
sense of all kinds, and made men of, instead of ghosts 
and phantoms. We are weary of gliding ghostlike 
through the world, which is itself so slight and unreal. 
We crave a sense of reality, though it come in strokes 
of pain. I explain so, — by this manlike love of truth, 
— those excesses and errors into which souls of great 
vigor, but not equal insight, often fall. They feel 
the poverty, at the bottom of all the seeming affluence 
of the world. They know the speed with which they 
come straight through the thin masquerade, and con- 
ceive a disgust at the indigence of nature : Rousseau, 
Mirabeau, Charles Fox, Napoleon, Byron, — and I 
could easily add names nearer home, of raging riders, 
who drive their steeds so hard, in the violence of living 
to forget its illusion : they would know the worst, and 
tread the floors of hell. The heroes of ancient and 
modern fame, Cimon, Themistocles, Alcibiades, Alex- 
ander, Caesar, have treated life and fortune as a game 
to be well and skilfully played, but the stake not to 



NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS. 507 

be so valued, but that any time, it could be held as a 
trifle light as air, and thrown up. Caesar, just before 
the battle of Pharsalia, discourses with the Egyptian 
priest, concerning the fountains of the Nile, and offers 
to quit the army, the empire, and Cleopatra, if he will 
show him those mysterious sources. 

The same magnanimity shows itself in our social 
relations, in the preference, namely, which each man 
gives to the society of superiors over that of his equals. 
All that a man has, will he give for right relations 
with his mates. All that he has, will he give for an 
erect demeanor in every company and on each occa- 
sion. He aims at such things as his neighbors prize, and 
gives his days and nights, his talents and his heart, to 
strike a good stroke, to acquit himself in all men's sight 
as a man. The consideration of an eminent citizen, 
of a noted merchant, of a man of mark in his profes- 
sion, naval and military honor, a general's commission, 
a marshal's baton, a ducal coronet, the laurel of poets, 
and, anyhow procured, the acknowledgment of eminent 
merit, have this lustre for each candidate, that they 
enable him to walk erect and unashamed, in the pres- 
ence of some persons, before whom he felt himself infe- 
rior. Having raised himself to this rank, having es- 
tablished his equality with class after class, of those 
with whom he would live well, he still finds certain 
others, before whom he cannot possess himself, because 
they have somewhat fairer, somewhat grander, some- 
what purei', which extorts homage of him. Is his 
ambition pure ? then, will liis laurels and his posses- 
sions seem worthless : instead of avoiding these men 
who make his fine gold dim, he will cast all behind 



5o8 LECTURE AT AMORY HALL. 

him, and seek their society only, woo and embrace 
this his humiliation and mortification, until he shall 
know why his eye sinks, his voice is husky, and his 
brilliant talents are paralyzed in this presence. He is 
sure that the soul which gives the lie to all things, 
will tell none. His constitution will not mislead him. 
If it cannot carry itself as it ought, high and unmatch- 
able in the presence of any man, if the secret oracles 
whose whisper makes the sweetness and dignity of his 
life, do here withdraw and accompany him no longer, 
it is time to undervalue what he has valued, to dis- 
possess himself of what he has acquired, and with 
Caesar to take in his hand the army, the empire, and 
Cleopatra, and say, " All these will I relinquish, if 
you will show me the fountains of the Nile.^' Dear 
to us are those who love us ; the swift moments we 
spend with them are a compensation for a great deal 
of misery: they enlarge our life; — but dearer are 
those who reject us as unworthy, for they add another 
life : they build a heaven before us, whereof we had 
not dreamed, and thereby supply to us new powers 
out of the recesses of the spirit, and urge us to new 
and unattempted performances. 

As every man at heart wishes the best and not infe- 
rior society, wishes to be convicted of his error, and 
to come to himself, so he wishes that the same healing 
should not stop in his thought, but should penetrate 
his will or active power. The selfish man suffers more 
from his selfishness, than he from whom that selfish- 
ness withholds some important benefit. What he 
most wishes is to be lifted to some higher platform, 
that he may see beyond his present fear the transalpine 



NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS. 509 

good, so that his fear, his coldness, his custom may be 
broken up like fragments of ice, melted and carried 
away in the great stream of good-will. Do you ask 
my aid? I also wish to be a benefactor. I wish 
more to be a benefactor and servant, than you wish to 
be served by me, and surely the greatest good fortune 
that could befall me, is precisely to be so moved by 
you that I should say, * Take me and all mine, and 
use me and mine freely to your ends ! ' for, I could 
not say it, otherwise than because a great enlargement 
had come to my heart and mind, which made me supe- 
rior to my fortunes. Here we are paralyzed with fear ; 
we hold on to our little properties, house and land, 
office and money, for the bread which they have in our 
experience yielded us, although we confess, that our 
being does not flow through them. We desire to be 
made great, we desire to be touched with that fire 
which shall command this ice to stream, and make our 
existence a benefit. If therefore we start objections 
to your project, friend of the slave, or friend of tho 
poor, or of the race, understand well, that it is because 
we wish to drive you to drive us into your measures. 
We wish to hear ourselves confuted. We are haunted 
with a belief that you have a secret, which it would 
highliest advantage us to learn, and we would force 
you to impart it to us, though it should bring us to 
prison, or to worse extremity. 

Nothing shall warp me from the belief, that every 
man is a lover of truth. There is no pure lie, no pure 
malignity in nature. The entertainment of the propo- 
sition of depravity is the last profligacy and profana- 
tion. There is no scepticism, no atheism but that. 



510 LECTURE AT AMORY HALL. 

Could it be received into common belief, suicide would 
unpeople the planet. It has had a name to live in 
some dogmatic theology, but each man's innocence 
and his real liking of his neighbor, have kept it a dead 
letter. I remember standing at the polls one day, 
when the anger of the political contest gave a certain 
grimness to the faces of the independent electors, and 
a good man at my side looking on the people, re- 
marked, " I am satisfied that the largest part of these 
men, on either side, mean to vote right.^' I suppose, 
considerate observers looking at the masses of men, in 
their blameless, and in their equivocal actions, will 
assent, that in spite of selfishness and frivolity, the 
general purpose in the great number of persons is fidel- 
ity. The reason why any one refuses his assent to your 
opinion, or his aid to your benevolent design, is in you : 
he refuses to accept you as a bringer of truth, because, 
though you think you have it, he feels that you have 
it not. You have not given him the authentic sign. 

If it were worth while to run into details this gen- 
eral doctrine of the latent but ever soliciting Spirit, it 
would be easy to adduce illustration in particulars of 
a man's equality to the church, of his equality to the 
state, and of his equality to every other man. It is 
yet in all men's memory, that, a few years ago, the 
liberal churches complained, that the Calvinistic church 
denied to them the ntoe of Christian. I think the 
complaint was confession : a religious church would 
not complain. A religious man like Behmen, Fox, or 
Swedenborg, is not irritated by wanting the sanction 
of the church, but the church feels the accusation of 
his presence and belief 



NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS. 511 

It only needs, that a just man should walk in our 
streets, to make it appear how pitiful and inartificial 
a contrivance is our legislation. The man whose part 
is taken, and who does not wait for society in any- 
thing, has a power which society cannot choose but 
feel. The familiar experiment, called the hydrostatic 
paradox, in which a capillary column of water bal- 
ances the ocean, is a symbol of the relation of one man 
to the whole family of men. The wise Dandamis, on 
hearing the lives of Socrates, Pythagoras, and Dioge- 
nes read, "judged them to be great men every way, 
excepting, that they were too much subjected to the 
reverence of the laws, which to second and authorize, 
true virtue must abate very much of its original 
vigor." 

And as a man is equal to the church, and equal to 
the state, so he is equal to every other man. The dis- 
parities of power in men are superficial ; and all frank 
and searching conversation, in which a man lays him- 
self open to his brother, apprises each of their radical 
unity. When two persons sit and converse in a thor- 
oughly good understanding, the remark is sure to be 
made. See how we have disputed about words ! Let a 
clear, apprehensive mind, such as every man knows 
among his friends, converse with the most commanding 
poetic genius, I think, it would appear that there was 
no inequality such as men fancy between them ; that a 
perfect understanding, a like receiving, a like perceiv- 
ing, abolished differences, and the poet would confess, 
that his creative imagination gave him no deep advan- 
tage, but only the superficial one, that he could express 
himself, and the other could not ; that his advantage 



512 LECTURE AT AMORY HALL. 

was a knack, which might impose on indolent men, but 
could not impose on lovers of truth ; for they know 
the tax of talent, or, what a price of greatness the 
power of expression too often pays. I believe it is 
the conviction of the purest men, that the net amount 
of man and man does not much vary. Each is in- 
comparably superior to his companion in some faculty. 
His want of skill in other directions, bas added to his 
fitness for his own work. Each seems to have some 
compensation yielded to him by his infirmity, and 
every hinderance operates as a concentration of his 
force. 

These and the like experiences intimate, that man 
stands in strict connection with a higber fact never yet 
manifested. There is power over and behind us, and 
we are the channels of its communications. We seek 
to say thus and so, and over our head some spirit sits, 
which contradicts what we say. We would persuade 
our fellow to this or that ; another self within our eyes 
dissuades him. That which we keep back, this re- 
veals. In vain we compose our faces and our words ; 
it holds uncontrollable communication with the enemy, 
and he answers civilly to us, but believes the spirit. 
We exclaim, ^' There 's a traitor in the house ! '^ but at 
last it appears that he is the true man, and I am the 
traitor. This open channel to the highest life is the 
first and last reality, so subtle, so quiet, yet so tena- 
cious, that although I have never expressed the truth, 
and although I have never heard the expression of it 
from any other, I know that the whole truth is here 
for me. What if I cannot answer your questions ? 
I am not pained that I cannot frame a reply to the 



NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS. 513 

question, What is the operation we call Providence ? 
There lies the unspoken thing, present, omnipresent. 
Eveiy time we converse, we seek to translate it into 
speech, but whether we hit, or whether we miss, we 
have the fact. Every discourse is an approximate an- 
swer : but it is of small consequence, that we do not 
get it into verbs and nouns, whilst it abides for con- 
templation forever. 

If the auguries of the prophesying heart shall make 
themselves good in time, the man who shall be born, 
whose advent men and events prepare and foreshow, 
is one who shall enjoy his connection with a higher 
life, with the man within man; shall destroy distrust 
by his trust, shall use his native but forgotten methods, 
shall not take counsel of flesh and blood, but shall rely 
on the Law alive and beautiful, which works over our 
heads and under our feet. Pitiless, it avails itself of 
our success, when we obey it, and of our ruin, when 
we contravene it. Men are all secret believers in it, 
else, the word justice would have no meaning : they 
believe that the best is the true ; that right is done at 
last ; or chaos would come. It rewards actions after 
their nature, and not after the design of the agent. 
" Work," it saith to man, " in every hour, paid or un- 
paid, see only that thou work, and thou canst not es- 
cape the reward : whether thy work be fine or coarse, 
planting corn, or writing epics, so only it be honest 
work, done to thine own approbation, it shall earn a 
reward to the senses as well as to the thought : no 
matter, how often defeated, you are born to victory. 
The reward of a thing well done, is to have done it." 

As soon as a man is wonted to look beyond sur- 

33 



514 LECTURE AT AMORY HALL. 

faces, and to see how this high will prevails without an 
exception or an interval, he settles himself into seren- 
ity. He can already rely on the laws of gravity, that 
every stone will fall where it is due ; the good globe is 
faithful, and carries us securely through the celestial 
spaces, anxious or resigned : we need not interfere to 
help it on, and he will learn one day the mild lesson 
they teach, that our own orbit is all our task, and we 
need not assist the administration of the universe. Do 
not be so impatient to set the town right concerning the 
unfounded pretensions and the false reputation of cer- 
tain men of standing. They are laboring harder to 
set the town right concerning themselves, and will cer- 
tainly succeed. Suppress for a few days your criti- 
cism on the insufficiency of this or that teacher or 
experimenter, and he will have demonstrated his in- 
sufficiency to all men's eyes. In like manner, let a 
man fall into the divine circuits, and he is enlarged. 
Obedience to his genius is the only liberating influence. 
We wish to escape from subjection, and a sense of in- 
feriority, — and we make self-denying ordinances, we 
drink water, we eat grass, we refuse the laws, we go to 
jail : it is all in vain : only by obedience to his genius ; 
only by the freest activity in the way constitutional to 
him, does an angel seem to arise before a man, and 
lead him by the hand out of all the wards of the 
prison. 

That which befits us, embosomed in beauty and 
wonder as we are, is cheerfulness aud courage, and 
the endeavor to realize our aspirations. The life of 
man is the true romance, which, when it is valiantly 
conducted, will yield the imagination a higher joy 



NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS. 515 

than any fiction. All around us, what powers are 
wrapped up under the coarse mattings of custom, and 
all wonder prevented. It is so wonderful to our neu- 
rologists that a man can see without his eyes, that it 
does not occur to them, that it is just as wonderful, 
that he should see with them ; and that is ever the 
difference between the wise and the unwise : the latter 
wonders at what is unusual, the wise man wonders at 
the usual. Shall not the heart which has received so 
much, trust the Power by which it lives? May it 
not quit other leadings, and listen to the Soul that 
has guided it so gently, and taught it so much, secure 
that the future will be worthy of the past ? 



THE END. 



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